Best article I’ve read all week. I’ve been pretty enaged with Twitter trying to compare relevant traffic click throughs vs. Facebook, and at the end of the Facebook consistently returns a greater degree of participation than Twitter 9 times out of 10 (especially after you remove the not traffic from your numbers). It seems to me that 80/90 % of traffic from Twitter is bot traffic, artifically inflating your numbers quite dramatically. I often find myself having to ignore results from Twitter traffic. Interestingly enough, from an online fundraising perspective – The most successful conversions seem to come from email followed closesly by facebook. Twitter doesn’t even compare.

Now one thing will give them is their ability to tap into realtime events on the web related back to news worthy events around the globe. I’ve often though of Twitter more as the “new” associated press. Allocating more power to citizen journalism. It seems to me this is their greatest asset. There could be business applications down the line, but mainly to businesses that syndicated and dig through content for relevant real time news.

Presently, the majority of people on Twitter do one of two things. Either, babel about parts of their lives only close friends, family members and stalkers care about or their observations about events. Most of the observations are about events already in the media, i.e. the death of Michael Jackson. However, periodically, people get out of their house, look up from their Iphone and tweet about something they are seeing that is interesting, compelling and relevant.

Every time Twitter scoops mainstream media, or mainstream media relies entirely on Twitter for information, Twitter shows its, mostly hidden, value. If the information on Twitter can be organized to addressed real time observed events and stay away from a lot of the echo chamber problems it currently exhibits, it will demonstrate a lot more value and not feel like a social chore.

Twitter lived up to that potential and was fun during the election cycle. That probably helped me tweak my feed enough that I’m now more likely to turn to my Twitter feed for news on big events than I am to turn on CNN. So I can give Twitter credit for ending my cyclical attempts to nurture an RSS habit. In the end, it’s probably not fair to overlook all the buzz about Twitter democratizing the news. For these reasons, I would miss it.

In my everyday life, however, Twitter has failed to engage the people I work with on a regular basis. They don’t have a candidate, a band or a brand to promote and they can’t imagine there is any payoff for using the service. I haven’t been able to convince teachers or grad students to utilize Twitter as a back channel at the events that matter most to our work.

As a result, Twitter is no longer something I discuss in terms of its potential. The jerks and the spammers have increased the cost of participation and the benefits never materialized.