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.
