This BBC report on Twitter doesn't surprise me much:

Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found.

It goes on to note that most people who join Twitter update once and then forget the service. Why am I not surprised? Cast your mind back to the early 2000's, when blogging was the "next big thing". You could find tons of breathless stories about how "everyone" was starting a blog, and how RSS readers were going to replace browsers.

A funny thing happened on the way to that bright future; it turned out that most people just don't want to write fresh content every day, for a variety of reasons. While blogging is easier than keeping a diary with a pen, it's scratching the same itch - a desire to record to passage of time, from the sublime to the mundane. Just as history isn't filled with diarists, it's not going to be filled with bloggers.

Nor, it seems, will it be filled with Tweets. While it's easier still to drop 140 characters, it still requires effort, and the motivation to either get a Twitter client or keep a browser open on the Twitter home page.

Which is not to say that blogs and Twitter have no value - it's just that having a healthy level of skepticism about the amount of uptake is useful.

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