COMMENTS
I'm very curious at how you got this information.
On a personal note, I love Tweetdeck. Though, I hate it in the afternoons. It always kills my computer. Anyone have anything that can do the job of Tweetdeck without hurting my processor speed?
Interesting that so many people actually log into Twitter.com--wonder why that is. There are so many better experiences for Twitter via apps (WWW and mobile). Is boundry in the download?
Hi Mike,
This may be true for most people on Twitter, but when you start looking at the Big Swinging Tweets, another pattern emerges. The big guns use desktop apps much more heavily.
http://cli.gs/grbrZz
I personally use Twhirl. It uses relatively low disk space & is effective for me to keep up with my directs, replies & with the Twitter stream in general.
Anyone see a better interface emerging for separating feeds into channels?
Right now I have two twitter profiles one to deal with my two primary hobbies the other for more business and news oriented focus. Merging them but still keeping them separate would be ideal to me.
Nonpretentious, Tweet me @mallikarjunan, we can have a serious conversation about whatever tickles your fancy!
As a side note, the web interface for Twitter is atrocious. I, personally, us TweetDeck because of how beautifully it organizes (and live-updates) my messages and searches.
Rich... Big Swinging Tweets?? LMAO.
Patrick,
Twhirl is for you. You can manage separate accounts at the same time. TweetDeck is better for creating groups of followers.
Sam, the name seemed fitting.
I'm new to Twitter (finally joined after learning how many people are using it at OMS) and still trying to figure all this out. But good stuff to know.
I tried to Tweet this article and the link went to a "page cannot be displayed" in IE7.
Rich, yeah it's fitting, I just laughed at the Boiler Room reference (intentional or not) lol.
How do you use TweetDeck to create groups of followers?
Jayson, same thing happened to me in Firefox. Looks like someone has a broken link lol... Guess we'll have to not be lazy and actually copy the URL!
Sam, see http://twitpic.com/1q60s
Create a group, then assign people to it. Very useful.
We posted our magazine stories to Twitter using Twitterfeed, which works great as an automation tool. The only downside is that is posts the page title as it displays in the RSS feed, which happens to be our article headline. We wanted a more personal approach then just posting our article headlines, and wanted to be selective about which articles were streamed (as to not overwhelm our followers with EVERYTHING.) So back to the manual tweeting that only takes a few minutes a day.
@govtechnews
New Twitter folks still feeling their way likely get enough from the web interface and consider dedicated apps overkill. (It's not bad to follow 50 or 60 people that way.) Once you get some community hooks and conversation threads, though, messages get snarled and need reply trackers and (ideally) ongoing hashtag or keyword searches.
Another great post Mike!!
We use twitter, twitterfeed and tweet deck...
Just starting to use hashtags-
As a newbie to Twitter - I know what hashtags are for but how do you use them? what do they look like in a tweet?
Great graphs and post, I've bookmarked this and will referrer back to this when I get questions about who uses twitter.
Thanks!
@vBSetup
Poor Tweetie didn't make the cut! Not yet anyway
Very surprising that so many use the web interface. I am on TweetDeck, for its multi-column search. Don't like that I am limited to the one account.
Also playing around with alertThingy.
My partner is using TweetLater. I haven't broken into that one yet. Thoughts?
Great information about Twitter application usage. I personally like using the web. I don't need to know or follow or catch up with what everybody is saying, doing so would drive me insane!
Its amazing how much these types of solical sites have grown in such a short period of time. Lets just say that if your not on sites such as twitter, you are lossing so much traffic you will cry yourself to sleep.
Thanks for the post, I look forward to the next one.
P.S. Lets not forget about resources such as Digg, Propeller or Mixx!!!
Kate M.
DIMS
<a http://www.squidoo.com/Dallas-Internet-Marketing-Services">Dallas Internet Marketing Solutions
I tried some of the twitter interfaces only to find they slowed down or crashed my system. Is there any general consensus out there about which ones are the best? Is there a website/blog where I can go to get this info?
I am a fan of tweetdeck, though I wish it did not have to run to cache tweets. Need a way to grab tweets since last time online (Pop3 ish I suppose).
I think you have to find the app that fits your usage. I personally like Twitbin, an addon to Mozilla/FireFox. It's not a separate app so I can monitor (or not) tweets as they scroll by without trying to manage a separate window. I mark my favs for later perusal. Tweetdeck "favs" is greyed out and unusable for me - and I hate "sliding" between groups. That unhappy function alone made (for me) the idea of custom groups a pain (despite the fact I very much want them). I'd rather click and go so have squished myself into Twitbin despite it not having a custom favorites group. For my purposes, it works best - one click and I see @, DMS and favs. I engage as it suits me during the day. So play, play, play!!!!! I guess it's like figuring out how to play the room at a cocktail party?
Never heard of twitterfeed it looks a little spammy. Nothing more time wasting than people just tweeting their posts I always defollow such people.
I use the web interface or Twirl.
Never tried Tweetdeck but it seems useful.
It's unbelievable that nearly half of the Twitterers use web interface to Tweet
I thought I read this somewhere, and that is all tweets that are generated "from web" include all sorts of other apps and API-based services - not just the main web interface at twitter.com. Is that accurate?
Allan: Most custom software that is used to post tweets will identify itself with a specific label. In those rare cases where an application does not do that, twitter does indeed lump those into "web".
Anyone know of an iPhone app that would let you post to your blog (i guess it would have to be a well-known blogger app) then automatically update Twitter? If not, please go write it!
nonpretentious,
For longer, more serious conversations, try direct messages. You can exchange email addresses this way, if you care to
In what way is the sample random? From what kind and how big of a list was it selected?
Jeffrey: The way we collected the data sample is retrieving tweets throughout the day directly from the twitter public timeline. We did this over a relatively long period of time (months). It's as random as we know how to make it.
... and the sample was 500,000 tweets, which is a lot of data.
Thanks, I'm just trying to understand what it is representative of. The
sample size is immaterial if the results aren't random. What's the time period? Are you going to do any breakouts by different time periods, to show how usage has changed?
Good stuff -- many thanks for what you've done!
I like Twhirl because it's systray-resident, and I don't have to do anything or go anywhere to see tweets as they come in. As much as I like Tweetdeck, it still suffers from the same problem as the web interface in that I have to consciously stop what I'm doing and go check in.
Matt-
If you like all-in-one social media desktop clients, check out alert thingy.
really this is all you need to know....
http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/
Great breakdown....It's interesting to see so many using the web, but makes sense. I'm finding myself prefering Tweetie on my iPhone over anything on my PC. I use Tweetdeck but find it a bit cumbersome and CPU intensive.
I think you're going to see a crackdown on TweetDeck and other Adobe AIR based applications once corporate IT departments catch wind of them. There are apparently several serious network security risks inherent in that technology.
One of the growing "Twitting" service is Proxifeed (http://proxifeed.com), which will soon be sharing the ever growing ~12% share of syndicated tweets.
I don't see Seesmic mentioned anywhere here...must relatively new.
The fact that most people use the web interface to tweet must be why a lot of them fall dormant quickly after they sign up. Having an app is essential to tweeting..I've gone through 4 twitter Flex based apps (Twhirl, TweetDeck, Orsiso, and now Seesmic). Of all, I've stuck with Seesmic. However, I do look forward to an iPhone soon :)
More great stats. Just confirms what we know and suspect. A good 10% of traffic appears to be aoutomated (mostly spam?)- and the web browser interface is naff.
On that note (*plug*) :
What I hate about the latests Twitter browsers changes As it happens I do (still) prefer simply using Firefox and Explorer over any other apps. Also, though I've (briefly tried a few) the security issues around the Air based apps give me the heeby jeebies!
The blog entry (linked above) gives a generally scathing review of Twitters current interface, but can be summed up by questioning why is it so poor when the have all that money and resources and yet the likes of Tweetdeck, Karma Seesmic else are churning out great ideas.
Addenda: I several thousand followers (all manually vetted too!) and generally tweet to friends for several hour a day - 12 to 16 hours a day. Despite the prethera of options, I still find the browser easily to follow it and and still keep surfing for other stuff. That said, I remain utterly disgusted with Twitters lack of innovation and (it seems to me) support of spammers at the expense of real users.
(PS sorry for spaces on last post, did not expect that at all!)