It’s hard to say if this is merely a function of the ecosystem of tweets vs the rest of the stuff in peoples’ lives or simply not the best design for how the information is distributed and consumed. Perhaps the process of opening a link isn’t streamlined enough to sway those who deal with information overload by saying “i might have clicked it, but I’m keeping myself from being distracted”.

Like you say, Twitter may come and go, but the desire/need for nuggets of communication will stick around. Certainly it does a lot of things right .. but there certainly are pitfalls with respect to theoretical expectations.

And of course, I wouldn’t doubt the content itself had an impact as well. Perhaps if there were an article titled “Transhumanists create Artificial Intelligence that only knows peace” (as much as that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense), I’d bet tweets by mega accounts would get a lot of hits.

I think it would be interesting to see *Twitter’s* stats with respect to mega accounts and their networks of followers. How many really are idle? How many of those followers actually click on articles from their network? What is *that* percentage of clicks in the context of all possible clicks they could have made? How long does it take a tweet to make it around to as much of the network as it likely will? How many of the followers of mega accounts would follow an account in a tweet of a mega account, if that new twitter account didn’t have the same number of followers? etc etc.

I have seem a lot of blogs go “twitroll”, where the blog simply becomes a collection of tweets pushed through to the blog. Not only is it ugly, it’s hard to read, and uninteresting to read.

I predicted a couple of years ago that Twitter would never hit it big, and I guess I was wrong. I still think, however, that Twitter is NOT the revolution we are looking for in social media. I think that has yet to come – it brought the speed, now someone needs a way to combine that with bringing back the CONTENT.

I have seem a lot of blogs go “twitroll”, where the blog simply becomes a collection of tweets pushed through to the blog. Not only is it ugly, it’s hard to read, and uninteresting to read.

I predicted a couple of years ago that Twitter would never hit it big, and I guess I was wrong. I still think, however, that Twitter is NOT the revolution we are looking for in social media. I think that has yet to come – it brought the speed, now someone needs a way to combine that with bringing back the CONTENT.