Is Twitter Losing Steam?

Bored, where are the interesting people, had a Twitter overdose, sick of Twitter — these are just some recent status messages I noticed on Twitter. This brings me to the subject of my post: Has Twitter become boring already?

The microblogging site that almost became a phenomenon in social networking, thanks to its speed, efficacy and brevity of news suddenly seems to be losing its charm. And to think, Twitter once grew at 1,382 per cent between February 2008 and 2009 without even having a business model, and even till recently saw a 1500% growth in registered users with 300,000 sign-ups every day and 55 million tweets a day. Here’s a quick guide to the Twitter numbers so far.

The statistics are unbelievably different in 2010, suggesting that Twitter might be losing steam. There’s been a mere 3.5% growth between Oct 2009 and Jan 2010 even though study shows the Twitter users are ‘more engaged’ now than ever before.

The smart, funny, intelligent, Twitterers or the popular professionals such as journalists, PR, techies, authors and film stars have a regular, dedicated fan following. But I guess it’s tough being smart, intelligent, humorous, whacky and productive everyday. So even if you are regular, you may not be able to sustain the same quality and quantity of tweets to hold your audience in thrall. Besides, after the initial enthusiasm dies down, users tend to become irregular, or too used to a certain brand of humour, news analysis, theories, jokes, etc., to be enticed by it anymore. That perhaps leads to the boredom.

Then there’s another lot that uses Twitter to settle their own scores publicly – like film stars and movie critics (read Big B-Rajiv Masand), who even have to resort to extending their tweets using Twitlonger to put their point across. Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of Twitter? Honestly, who cares about these ego clashes?

A quick search revealed that people have been getting bored of Twitter from late last year. Since there are no specific reasons outlined for the sudden slowdown, we can only speculate. And it appears to be largely personal behaviour. Apart from sharing news, interesting reads and search results, there’s only that much tweeple can say 140 characters. And after a while it maybe noticed that they rehash the same old jokes and hashtags. In fact, a couple of popular Indian tweeple were recently feeling nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ of tweeting when hashtags used to be ‘more fun’.

Source:http://in.yfittopostblog.com/