What does Twitter lack?

According to a study by Nielsen Online, more than 60 per cent of Twitter users stopped using the free social networking site a month after joining

What is the difference between a 100 meter spring and a marathon? While you need explosive short-term power for a quick run, you need to have a lot of endurance for a marathon. Running a Web site is a bit like doing both a sprint and a marathon. In the initial days, you need a lot of hype around your site, but you also need to learn how to sustain the site in the long run.

Quitters

Sustainability for a site means that people keep coming back for what you give them. This is critical because, without it, you cannot build critical mass. And Twitter seems to have a big problem here. A study by Nielsen Online says that Twitter's audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month's users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 per cent. What this means is that the remaining 60 per cent of the people don't come back for more Twitter updates the next month. 'We have had enough, thank you', seems to be their attitude.

Doom time?

While it looks like Twitter may lose n the long term against Facebook and MySpace, even Nielsen Online says that it could be too soon to call twitters as quitters.

As a blog entry by David Martin, VP for primary research at Nielsen Online says, 'Maybe we're jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days.'

Future peek

But this said, Twitter will need to have some worries for the future as Martin said in conclusion in his blog post, 'Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty. Frankly, if Oprah can't accomplish that, I'm not sure who can.' One of the biggest advantages of the Internet is the blazing speed at which things change. This gives entities like Twitter the ability to become a sensation overnight, but new-economy companies have to still learn one thing from old-economy companiesu00e2u0080u0094in the long run, sustainability is everything.

QUICK TAKE
>>Nielsen Online survey says tat only 40 per cent of Twitter users come back the next month
>>This lack of loyalty could be bad for the micro-blogging service
>>The company will have to learn how to sustain its popularity

Putting Twitter to use
While Twitter, like any other service, has its share of problems, it has also been used extensively. For example:
>>The Los Angeles Fire Department put the technology to use during the October 2007 California wildfires
>>Some NASA projects such as Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station provide updates via Twitter
>>Several 2008 US presidential campaigns used Twitter as a publicity mechanism, including that of Democratic Party nominee and President Barack Obama
>>David Saranga of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that on December 30, 2008, Israel would be the first government to hold a worldwide press conference via Twitter to take questions from the public about the war against Hamas in Gaza.
>>Ashton Kutcher was the first Twitter user to reach the one million follower mark, followed by the CNN Breaking News account and singer Britney Spears in second and third place respectively.
Source: Wikipedia