[GilbertErik]

...and how many people do you know? Not how many people are you following/interacting with on Twitter, but what's the number of people in your creative community? 100, 200, 250 tops? Just because your niche of friends is using Twitter as a preferred communications platform lends it no more credence as a popular/preferred platform over Live Messenger/Skype, Google+ Hangouts, Instagram, Facebook Messaging, etc.

As an experiment, count up the number of distinct people (that're following you back) that you've had twitter conversations with in the past 60 days.

[hobs]

One guy has an anecdote, then another guy has an anecdote. Unless it was actually analyzed as part of the whole, its all speculation.

[chipsy]

I follow over 1000 accounts on Twitter, almost all of them linked to specific individuals and involved in something creative - games, music, art, or writing(including journalism). So I have a little bit more data than most.

The tweet-per-day rates for these accounts roughly follow a power law, going by a mix of sampling individual accounts and observing my own TL. A decent number are known to be real but look essentially abandoned(from a follower's perspective - they may be lurking). At the other end some top 200 tweets per day. The middle of the curve is at around 4-5 TPD.

These accounts do not all treat Twitter uniformly, of course. Some broadcast their personal updates to work or life. Some of them ask questions. Some are posting bon mots. By far the most popular activity is commentary on news items, though. Because I follow so many accounts I also see a substantial subset of semi-private conversations, which usually appear from the commentary tweets.

Now: Is this valuable? The technical restrictions mean it doesn't replace email or regular blogging, but I see a lot of serendipitous conversations that can't occur in other contexts(too much overhead). This is nearly ideal for creative types, and I believe that is what's making them gravitate to it.

[tomasien]

Yeah I mean I was just making my anecdotal observation. I wouldn't say my community is more than 100 people, and I probably interact with 40-50 on Twitter regularly (in a month). Not a huge sample, just what I can see from my small window into the world.