Poll: 31% of People Think They Can Predict Twitter's Future
69% of respondents to a new poll performed last month say they don't know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about its future. That might sound pretty dismal after all the media attention the social network has received, but who amongst us could blame a person for not feeling qualified to comment on the future of an emerging communication paradigm? Twitter is complicated! It seems just as remarkable that 31% of people think they do know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about its future.
Check out these survey options below and tell us which of those answers you'd have given if asked.
The poll was from Harris Interactive in partnership with LinkedIn and surveyed more than 2000 people. Harris doesn't know enough about RSS feeds to have an opinion about them on their own poll and press release pages, so it wasn't until five days after publication that the LA Times tech blog discovered this latest gem.
Look at these survey options, though. Would you be so presumptuous to say you think the service will grow exponentially? That it will remain limited to youth and media users? I use Twitter all day long, think about it even more than that and write about it for a living and I would check that last box saying I don't know enough about it to have an opinion about its future.
Short-form, multi-platform, hyper-public, data-minable, @ and DM-rich streaming conversation in both real time and asynchronously? That's a new paradigm and anyone who thinks they can predict its future may be a bigger fool than the 69% of people who admitted they couldn't.
Obviously a substantial number of the 69% of respondents who don't know enough to have an opinion said so because they simply don't get Twitter at all. After all the media attention the service gets, does that mean that those people are stupid or that Twitter is stupid? To the degree to which either of those things are true, they don't tell the whole story at all. The element of mystery (as opposed to cynicism) is the most exciting part of this situation.
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An interesting poll! It should definitely be done again after Google Wave is released in the wild.
Those are the only 4 options they gave people? The methodology here is "suspect" at best... Not exactly "scientific". My guess is Harris wanted to do a poll about Twitter since it's the buzzword dujour (and they were hoping to get some press outta it), so they cranked this craptacular survey out.
Anytime I see a poll where a "none of the above" response is the majority, I assume that there is something wrong with the methodology.
Asking tweeps if they can predict the future.. Silly!
I'm pretty partial to it's already over. I think it will never break 50million a unique a month. I don't think it will die, I just think it's exponential growth is already over.
About Twitter - for sure not - and for the 'public micro-messaging medium' maybe a little. It will become the most accessible, participatory medium in history. It will rewire the web, weaving real-time, interest-driven context around every topic, object, and account. It will re-orient the web to default to public, and around an individual and what they publish in their streams. A massive 'remediation' of the web.
But really, what will that look like... ya right... it's shifting society as it goes, and society shifting independently at the same time. Guessing what this will look like is kind of like guessing what civilization will look like in 20 years.
Harris chose an interesting set of questions to ask, and there does not appear (in this post) to be any reference regarding if the respondents were actual "active" twitter users (if they use the service at all).
I agree that it is almost impossible to accurately predict how twitter will grow (the real question being asked in the poll) without knowing the inner-workings of the twitter team (not to mention potential competitors). Given the flawed nature of the survey, I think you have highlighted the one positive point (that at least the majority are able to admit they can't answer the question).
Perhaps a better way to ask the question would have been to query each individual user's future twitter usage plans and look for crowd-oriented trends that might indicate whether user growth is sustainable and what market segments might out-perform others (I've got to assume that those are the type of questions/surveys bouncing around the inner sanctum at twitter-central).
Just a thought.
But none of them are right!
Poll is a little twisted when only one of the surveys is shown. Have a look at the other poll, one with 1015 avertisers who had an altogether different opinion of Twitter to the adults survey shown above. Also check out the Twitter effectiveness survey for both groups polled.
The thing to bear in mind is that this was a small poll and we don't even know if they use Twitter!
Statistics...statistics and whatever else they say..
The growth and development of Twitter depends on how well it is accepted as a medium of communication. In this respect, the management has a major role to play. There would always be some breaking news and Twitter can cash in on this happenings. So the poll figure is sure to change with in the future.
Richard
Poll: 31% of People Think They Can Predict Twitter's Future http://bit.ly/PF3OP (69% say they don't know enough about it to have an opinion) [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2892209152]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 11, 2009 10:26 AM