I don’t want this to be one of those nostalgic posts that remember the “good old days” on one of the more popular social networks. No, I just want to share some very unscientific findings that made me scratch my head.

See, I’ve been on Twitter for almost four years now. Not as long as some of the more pronounced early adopters, but long enough to see the changes in the social network for better or worse. Like I said earlier, this is not a post to bash on what Twitter is today, but just to bring to light what those changes are and get input from other users to see if they’re observing some of the same things.

So, to set the stage, let me tell you a little about the Twitter environment I reside in. As of this publishing, I have tweeted 25,406 times, I have 5,652 followers and I follow 607 people. And the makeup of those 607 people equate to some of the most socially savvy people in the Twitterverse.

To obtain a sample for this post, I categorized 100 tweets in my stream starting at 1:12 pm on January 23, 2012. I broke them into fairly distinct categories, but you will see that a few could have been combined (i.e., Foursquare, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.). I chose to leave them as separate categories, though. The tweets broke out as follows:

Type of Tweet                                                                                                  # Tweets

Links (a tweet with a clickable link) 53
Conversation (tweets with people actually conversing) 15
Status Updates 13
Retweets 11
Foursquare Updates 4
Spotify Updates 1
Pinterest Updates 1
YouTube Links 1
Instagram Updates 1

So what are my observations from the findings? Well at least in my world, conversation has taken a back seat to sharing other pieces of content in a big way. Not to say this is a bad thing. After all, I’d be the first to admit that I source a large percentage of my content consumption via Twitter. I do, however, miss those multi-person conversations that would be moving so fast it would be hard to keep up. They were entertaining and provided different points of view on a multitude of subject matter in one easy to digest package.

But enough about my Twitter experience circa 2012, I’d love to hear your observation of today’s foremost micro blogging network! Let me know your thoughts.

© 2012 – 2018, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.

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