Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Twitter Traffic Flattening?

Recently, John Battelle of Federated Media and author of the book, Search posted a tweet with data alluding to Twitter traffic flattening.

Oddly enough about a week ago, I was with a friend who is the President and COO of a company called Best Doctors. He’s very active on Twitter and within the blogosphere. He uses both to expand and educate people on health care issues and connect with other professionals in his business.

I suggested to him that I thought Twitter seemed to be slowing down. I didn’t have the sophisticated data that Quantcast has. My conclusion was purely observational. I use a Twitter app called TweetDeck. Call it a Twitter dashboard if you will. One of the several features to TweetDeck is a column called TwitScoop that shows what people are talking about and how popular those topics are. Other Twitter applications offer similar features. Several web sites such as Yahoo have similar features generally based on search activity.

What I noticed with TwitScoop was that what people were talking about on Twitter were for the most part niche topics.

When I first started using Twitter what I discovered was that Twitter is essentially a place to begin a conversation with like minded individuals or as I like to say, “affinity groups”. You’ll of course see anomalies. A timely example is the passing of Patrick Swayze in which lots of people will post some commentary on a popular event. I myself posted “Pain don’t hurt”, a quote by the Swayze character Dalton from the movie Road House.

My belief is certainly that Twitter is here to stay. However, I predict that it’s finding its stride as a very effective tool to connect to various affinity groups and begin meaningful conversations globally, not just a place to tell people what kind of sandwich you’re having.

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