Tweetle-Dis
I just came came across this study by Rapleaf showing how people tweet...
Web-site Story
I'm shocked that almost 2/3 of all tweets are done via the web. Yes, Twitter.com has gotten much sleeker and more user-friendly in recent months but it's still a far cry from the utility that app's likeTweetDeck provide.
Using Twitter through the web can be very tedious. In fact, most people I know that have signed up for Twitter then quickly abandoned it after not finding any value (aka orphan tweets) only tried using the service through Twitter.com.
Some key features missing from Twitter.com include the ability to:
- Break the stream of updates into specific groups
- View @replies and DM's in the same window
- Quickly post from multiple accounts
- Track specific searches
- Post to Facebook (understandably)
- One-click retweet
- Shorten URLs
- Preview URLs
- Translate tweets
All of these are available via TweetDeck and other apps.
Calling It Twits
Truth is, unlike those orphan tweets who quit Twitter after finding no value, I've gotten so much utility that I'm considering quitting myself. It's just become too much of a distraction.
The same thing happened to me with instant messenger about 5 years ago. It was a great tool for communicating quickly with co-workers, clients, colleagues, friends and family -- to the point where I spent so much time IM'ing on and off throughout the day that I had a hard time completing tasks due to frequent interruptions. So I quit cold turkey and my productivity went thru the roof.
I've almost reached that same breaking-point with Twitter. It's great to keep my fingers on the pulse of what's happening out there and I've found tremendous value in meeting new people and finding new information but I find myself Twitter-toggling so often throughout the day that I get thrown off task.
Just today, I decided to take a break from a project to do a quick tweet-check and came across a great link from @Shamberg so I went to read his post, then had to retweet it, then emailed it to some colleagues and engaged in a debate over the merits of content distribtuion and Johnny Cash analogies. 30 minutes later I forgot what I was working on before that quick tweet-check.
Off-Deck
So, to all the twits I follow and the tweeps that follow me, consider this your advance notice. I'm walking the line of going tweet-free. Please stop posting interesting links and providing useful feedback on my tweets.
On second thought, if I really need to find a way to get less value from Twitter, maybe I should just go back to using Twitter.com.
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