Having finished 27Things, I was investigating Facebook to decide whether or not to join, and my first thought was: "Does anyone want to know what I'm eating for dinner?" This was the initial question I had about Twitter. I am now an avid user of Twitter and have come to realize that blogs, Twitter, Facebook etc. are tools to use as you will. I am trying to use these tools to find connections and links to things I enjoy and for self-education.
There was a thought-provoking article posted by arstechnica (a tweeter) that concluded from a HubSpot study that the majority of Web users like to sit on the sideline, especially when it comes to user generated content . To be more specific: only 0.2% of Flickr users uploaded pictures; only 0.16% of YouTube traffic uploaded video. Of Twitter's 4.5 million accounts, 54.9% have never tweeted and 52.7% have no followers.
In a survey of Facebook users done by frogloop, the conclusion was that Facebook users don't pay much attention to most of their online friends. Only a small fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that use Facebook Causes have brought in $1,000; and less than1% of Facebook members who have joined a Cause actually have donated money.
I don't know what statistics are out there for blogs, but I can't imagine that all 56 million of them are active and exciting.
The conclusion I have reached is that we are humans, and not all humans have the same interests or abilities or levels of involvement. These web tools enable us to find to find other humans with similar interests to form a community (that's a great part of Web 2.0). Wikipedia defines community as a "group of people with a complex net of overlapping commonalities". I'll tweet to that!
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Sure - jumping in and blurting something stupid is a fear of just about everyone, at first. However, judging by the posts from our co-workers, they really do have good stuff to say, and I hope they all continue blogging!
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