And I definitely wasn’t surprised when the same Atlanta Business Chronicle article referenced a Harvard Business Review report that said the top 10 percent of Twitter users write 90 percent of the Tweets.

Twitter’s traffic growth might not be this small, but the trend could mean that its star is rapidly sinking into the horizon.

Twitter is still a phenomenal way to share and acquire relevant information with highly definable audiences. However, its future as a viable marketing device is certainly in question, especially if the trend continues where it is primarily being used and embraced by a slim number of top users.

Why? Let’s count the ways:

• Remember what I wrote about blogs jumping the shark and to expect this condition to occur more rapidly? That’s precisely what’s happening to Twitter. The accelerated cycle for how quickly something can rise (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) or fall (e.g., MySpace, Facebook) is not only faster than ever, but it is fostering an even faster rate of acceleration.

• Twitter’s just not that fun. As Twitter’s fame grew, more people signed up…and then quickly discovered that it’s not a toy like Facebook, a chat with your pals like with instant messaging, entertaining like YouTube, or an expressive outlet like a blog.

• Twitter’s not economical, especially as you cross the threshold from newbie to popular follower. The first few weeks you used Twitter (after you found all of friends and they found you), you were lucky to have a handful of new followers each week.

Then, on a daily basis, it seemed like you were becoming overwhelmed with new followers that you had to research so you could determine if you wanted to follow them. Eventually, you don’t even bother adding more people because you don’t have time and you get the nagging feeling that it’s only going to result in more followers that you now really don’t have time to research.

• Some Twitterers have no sense of moderation. Everybody wants to believe that what they say is important, especially if they are sharing links or retweeting what somebody else wrote.

But when somebody Tweets with such frequency and haste that it creates so many consecutive messages from them that it seems like they are the only person you follow, not only does this contribute to the imbalance of messages left by top Twitters, but when the number of people that do that keeps growing, the “fun” and economy of being a Twitter user rapidly declines.

Not That All of This is Bad

Time will tell. Hopefully, the people that hope to monetize Twitter (especially those that use it to create fake accounts, spam Tweets, etc.) will realize that Twitter is only being used by a small segment of the online population…and they are using it for mostly informational purposes, rather than for fun or social reasons.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Industry Trends, Research and Studies, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.