Study: Microbloggers are really boring
A study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has found that most microbloggers are updating their status with "mundane" messages.
Curiously, the Finnish institute chose to examine the also-ran microblogging platform Jaiku. In sifting through 400,000 messages on Jaiku, HIIT found that the most common messages users send out include the words "working," "home," "work," "lunch," and "sleeping."
"Microblogging works because of the total control users have over their postings, but it is a hobby that seems to require a significant investment of time which many cannot afford," the Institute said in a statement.
Jaiku is now a shadow of its former self, some two years after it was acquired by Google. According to the site's About page, it's "maintained by volunteer Google engineers on their spare time," after the Web giant decided at the start of the year that a half-dozen products including Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Google Video weren't contributing to its brand or bottom line. In March, the service was moved to Google's App Engine. The company also open sourced its code base, putting the future of the service "in developer hands."
As valuable as the Institute's finding might be to Jaiku users, Twitter is the dominating force in the microblogging space. The Institute didn't analyze tweets, making the study less applicable to the entire population of microblog users.
That said, earlier this year the Oxford University Press studied 1.5 million tweets to see which words were found most frequently on the popular service. Aside from obvious words like "the," "it," "and," and "to," the organization found that "work", one of the top words on Jaiku, is also a top term on Twitter. It was included in over 26,000 tweets the organization analyzed and was one of the most-used terms on the site. One of the least-used terms Oxford found in its study was "running." It was included in just 3,195 of the 1.5 million tweets it researched.
The study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology will be available in an upcoming issue of the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
You think??? Microblogging is a fad. It came...and it will go, as 99% of them have nothing actually useful to say.
Now, if they looked at the waste of words on Facebook, Twitter, and the rest (but not Cnet comments, of course), we might find that the world would gain hours of productivity every day if these posters (but not Cnet ones) would just put themselves a big cup of ****. I think I better go get one, right now.
But that someone is "at work" or "eating a sandwich" - I probably don't care. I think microblogging is for superstars (I still don't care, but I know some people will) or machines. I'd probably like Subversion to microblog when there's an update or code has been checked out, that would be cool. I suppose it's still mundane, but at least it's useful.
On the one hand, this is a good thing because it keeps a lot of time wasters off Twitter (hopefully, those who can't won't). On the other hand, a less internet savvy newbie just might be a great contributor in a particular subject if they weren't turned off by feeling alone and lonely when they open their account and don't know what to do.
BTW, the study based on word use seemed inane to me. It doesn't seem like a worthy use of the Oxford U. Press' time! LOL! I don't know. It just seems to me that averaging in the directionless with their "lunch," "sleep," "home," numbers with tweets written by DRIVEN cause supporters, green living advisers, business enthusiasts, political news junkies and social media mavens dilutes the field in a misleading way.
Twitter itself may be a fad, but the ability to communicate as we can on Twitter is an internet innovation that will absolutely remain!
I just did a quick search of my stream in tweetdeck which holds nearly 10k tweets Several hundred of them use some derivative of the word "work" but exactly 12 of them said "off to work" to announce they wouldn't be tweeting anymore for several hours. 10 said they would be leaving work to announce they weren't available for a while. Of those people 21 different people 18 of them tweeted more than 30 times during the day and said nothing else mundane.
Furthermore "Mundane" is a very subjective word. Reading the other comments ahead of mine, I am forced to say most of the people making them wouldn't know mundane if it bit them in the ass. They sound like pompous blowhards who are sure everything they say on twitter is of the utmost importance and anything else is trivial. I would like to beat it through into their heads with a large heavy stick that social media is about socializing and talking about lunch might just be an ice breaker. That said, I doubt I would make it very far or only break my stick whacking the skulls of thick headed people who are legends only in their own minds.
@bradhart
- by OutAlive September 22, 2009 6:42 AM PDT
- Before I retired (from a career as programmer/analyst/dbadmin/system support) there was (briefly) a move by management to get us to file weekly reports detailing what we had been doing, literally, in 15 minute increments. It was universally reviled. I have to wonder how many of the protesters are now happily micro-blogging or twittering their lives in exactly the same way. BTW, the movement eventually died when management realized that people were spending most of their day (according to the reports) updating their daily log reports instead of actually doing productive tasks.
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