Are Twitters Quitters?

eWeek has an article on a recent Nielsen Online report that 60% of people who start twittering never return after a month. While you do expect attrition for any social network novelty, they claim it is much worse than the early days of Facebook or MySpace. Hopefully they fill the hopper faster than it drains. I don't know if anyone has numbers about blog abandonment in that regard. That would be interesting too.

My take is that there is simply too much noise. It is much easier to follow 50 blogs each with 1 blog a day than 100 twitterers with 10 tweets a day. I personally don't have the cycles to keep up. Perhaps the analogy of a fast food restaurant vs a great restaurant is appropriate. Where do you get the most enjoyment? You can argue it's hard to build a community at rush hour on a subway train because often that's what twitter feels like, i.e. a lot of people shouting and not sure who is really listening.

Having said that, I do enjoy scrolling back time on an individual twitterer to get a sense of what they've been up to without having to call. It's a great service and I'll continue using it but not sure if I would class it as necessity in my particular communication context.