Buzzword: Twitter quitter

I confess: I am a Twitter quitter. Despite the meteoric rise of this micro-blogging site among news organizations, celebrities, and politicians, I found it remarkably easy to stop using it. At first I felt guilty. I read newspapers online. I’m on Facebook. I text (albeit not with those insipid abbrevi8shnz). Twitter should have come naturally to me. It didn’t.

I feel better knowing that, according to a recent study, it doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people either. More than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return even one month after signing up, says a report by Nielsen. Twitter quitters are actually the majority.

But regular Twitterers are a loyal bunch, and they weren’t pleased with Nielsen’s study methods or its conclusion. Many Twitter users don’t actually log on to Twitter.com, they argue, but use third-party desktop applications like Tweetdeck or “tweet” from their mobile phones. They’re correct. Nielsen, sensitive to the criticism, updated its report “beyond just Twitter.com, adding in more than 30 Web sites and applications that feed into the Twitter community.” The retention rate climbed slightly, but still fell just shy of 40 percent. Why?

A few theories:

Twitter is a hungry beast. It wants updates. Frequent updates. If you don’t update, people will stop following you. If people stop following you, you lose the incentive to post. As if I had nothing else to do, now I have the pressure of keeping my “followers” entertained. In spite of my megalomaniacal ambitions, I throw my hands up, exhausted.

What I’m doing isn’t that interesting—why do you care? The best Twitterers know that their morning cinnamon raisin bagel is about as interesting as a cinnamon raisin bagel. Instead of posting the minutiae of their lives, conscientious Twitter folk make their pages enjoyable: interesting, breaking news items, links to other sites, maybe the occasional self-aggrandizing tweet—provided it’s engaging. All that requires a sustained dedication to the Twitterverse. I (and 60 percent of other users) am unable to commit.

You can’t have conversations. Twitter isn’t good for dialogue. It isn’t a chat room. Twitter posts, limited to 140 characters, are like the short “away messages” people leave on their instant message accounts, but there’s no way for friends or followers to directly, publicly comment. If they want to weigh in, they have to do so on their own Twitter page. The original poster can then reply on his own Twitter page. Communicable, but cumbersome.

While I don’t much like posting hourly, daily, or even monthly reports of my life, Twitter functions very well as a news aggregator. With applications like the aforementioned Tweetdeck, a user can follow a host of friends or organizations, getting updates all together on one screen. It makes you feel a bit like a bookie tracking game scores and races, except you’re following updates from your favorite newspaper columnists, blogs, newswires, whatever. Want updates on the swine flu? Follow the Centers for Disease Control on Twitter (@cdcemergency). Looking for stories from your favorite consumer magazine? Track Consumer Reports (@CReporter).

At the personal posting level, I’m still (for now) a Twitter quitter. But for news and information addicts, Twitter makes it tough to beat the habit.

Do you tweet, or are you a Twitter quitter yourself? Have an opinion about the new craze? Please, share below. —Nick K. Mandle

Comments

[Peter R. Wood]

I'm a Twitterer and I love it! You can check out the blog post I recently wrote regarding how I decide what to Tweet and how I decide who to follow. Helps keep me sane!

http://prwdot.org/2009/04/28/my-twitter-rulebook/

[All4Data]

Just stumbled this as "who shall go from twitter to quitter next"

I think there may be much more to come from Twitter before its slide begins though

[King]

How exactly is "abbrevi8shnz" an abbreviation? ;-)