Is Twitter Past Its Use-By Date?

Latest social networking sensation, Twitter, has been in the news lately as everybody signs up to the microblogging site – joining the likes of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo as a popular place to meet friends and send updates on what is happening in your life.

Despite the growth of Twitter (some reports state a 1000 percent increase in some countries in the past few weeks), a recent Neilsen Online study says a massive 60 percent of users hang around for about a month before ditching the service. And I’m one of them.

Why? Well, I can only speak for myself, but I would suggest that some of the reasons I signed up then stopped are similar to why others are dropping off.

For a start, I already have enough ways of connecting to people – whether it be email, land line, mobile phone and on a rare occasion Facebook. Then there is the Twitter service itself – some of the tweets I get are just stuff I don’t need to know. Sure I like my friends, but do I really need to know that at 8.45 on a Monday they went to the local cafe to buy their morning cappuccino? Or that the alarm didn’t go off? Then of course there is fact I have a business to run and a young family, so my time is precious.

I initially began using Twitter because I knew I was going to be asked to explain it and discuss the benefits as a social networking tool. Being in the tech industry, I love this kind of stuff, but now that I have done that and we all know about it the daily benefit of using it is disapearing. There are also just too many social networking sites around and I can do without it. I’m not saying it isn’t useful, because there are too many people who use it. But I think these days, most people are now being more picky about how much interaction they have with people online, and the means by which they do so.

Have you ditched any of the social networks? What are your favourite forms of communicating with friends and family?