Is Anyone Listening? Twitter's League of Fools

What did you expect? Social change?

Never figured out why Twitter got so much press - it's usefulness is questionable if not negligible.

But it sure does offer a glimpse into a Worcester City Councilor's mindset.

Look at the embarrassment it caused Councilor Toomey recently. The ole girl may be on the Vanguard of information technology, but she's certainly not at the Vanguard of smarts. An irate citizen can put a dent in a sanctimonious councilor's armor.

Imagine if all the Councilors had Twitter accounts for public business? I don't think the communication gap between citizen and councilor would be bridged. The gap is there for a reason. They just don't want to be bothered with your issues. Bigger fish to fry?

Undoubtedly the stuff Toomey posts on Twitter is worthless. So why do it? Keeps her name in front of the public's eyes. Maybe that ain't such a good idea as we recently saw. Then again. Maybe not. But what Kate doesn't know is that the overwhelming majority of voters ain't got a Twitter account. But maybe she's going after a niche group? Wusta's got lots of them. Oh, check her followers, not too many of them are twittering - months of gaps.

Look at her facebook page - its just plain dumb what she passes off as important. It seems to me she's just regurgitating the T&G. How creative!

Read the Wired article: Ever feel like you’re talking to a brick wall on Twitter? That might be because 71 percent of tweets get absolutely no response from the world.

Toronto-based social media analytics company Sysomos scanned 1.2 billion messages that were sent in August and September 2009 to try and get some idea of the kind of conversations that are going on. They discovered that more than seven in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world.

Of the remainder, just 6 percent get retweeted, and 92 percent of those retweets occur within the first hour. Multiplying those probabilities together means that fewer than one in 200 messages get retweeted after an hour’s gone by. Essentially, once that hour’s up, your message is ancient history.

That leaves 23 percent of messages that get an @reply. Drilling down, Sysomos found that 85 percent of replied-to messages get just one reply, 10.7 percent get two, and just 1.53 percent get three replies. Similarly to retweets, 96.9 percent of @replies are posted within an hour of the original tweet.
It’s not clear how the company treated messages that were both replied-to and retweeted.

The company also commissioned an animated visualization of the data. In the video embedded below, the spiral represents time, with the size of the blue dot representing the number of retweets and replies to that tweet. Following one dot over time, you should see it slowly grow as it gets replied-to and retweeted.

Read More: It's just not you: 71 percent of Tweets are ignored.