With Twitter having become one of the most popular social networking tools in the world, one has to wonder how many tweeters and tweets are too many? A New York Times article recently reported that the number of tweets per day exploded from 2.4 million to 26 million in a span of just nine months, according to a University of Iowa researcher.
The article explained that the growing number of tweets wasn't a problem to individual users, but had become a problem for corporate giants who invested money in being able to search users' tweets to tap into "the pulse of the world" (Microsoft, Google, etc.). Methods that used to work when using text searching (as used with search engines) have become useless because there is basically too much information out there in the world of twitter to pinpoint the info desired and searches end up with search overloads (i.e. the bing commercials).
Twitter's answer to the problem is geolocation, which basically uses global positioning in cell phones to "include a precise location" with each tweet. This allows those searching through tweets to filter them by location. The article states that this feature could be available in the next few weeks.
I think geolocation could be a great tool, not just for tweets but for the internet in general and all social networking as well. It would make it relative, kind of like going from national news to local news with one click. But, I think other problems will arise in the future with twitter, especially with all of the new tweeters joining the network. With geolocation and whatever other improvements occur in the near future, I think Twitter's most popular days have yet to be seen.
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I like the title of your post! I am a Twitter user, and I definitely get frustrated when the "fail whale" pops up. This happens when Twitter has reached capacity from too many posts. I can see how it would be hard to pinpoint Twitter searches and narrow it down to one idea. There are way too many posts on the same subjects. I enjoyed reading this post.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the post above. I love when I hear the use of the "twitter words," i.e twitting and twitters. I have yet to have a twitter account yet but I can see how there are so many people on twitter that would cause a slower process on twitter.
ReplyDeleteI've never used Twitter but, judging from the overwhelming popularity, I'm not surprised that its being overloaded with 'tweets.' At least they're coming up with something to refine and fix the problem.
ReplyDeleteI don't use twitter. But I'm no surprised that twitter is becoming overloaded with all these tweet comments and making the process slower. Hopefully they can fix it.
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