Life in bullet points...

Okay call me stuck up, but I seem to think that most things in life can be expressed in 3 simple bullet points. Anything more than that, has to be an attempt at humour; else it is so not worth it.

for example

• you are born
• you live
• you die

and the spaces in between; well they better be filled with humour...

Lets get to the point now...
I have a cosmic birthright that I refuse to give up.
I do not suffer fools gladly
And most things in life are simple; if you don't realize it, you are a fool

This brings us to our topic about having conversations:
Don't get me wrong, I love conversations: when they have a point.

The world is suffering from a conversational overdose. It seems that we all have collectively decided to speak out at the same time... and not every conversation is particularly aimed at someone; neither does every conversation have a point attached to it. Here are a few mundane facts:

Emails:

• Statistics, extrapolations and counting by Radicati Group from August 2008 estimate the number of emails sent per day (in 2008) to be around 210 billion. 183 billion messages per day means more than 2 million emails are sent every second. About 70% to 72% of them might be spam and viruses. The genuine emails are sent by around 1.3 billion email users.
• taking spam emails out, it still leaves 54.9 billion emails sent every day
• So on an average, each one out of 1.3 billion net savy people send out 42 emails a day

Facebook:
here are a few facts published by facebook
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

• More than 300 million active users; 50% of which log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide). This means each of 150 million users spends an average of 400 minutes on facebook daily...thats roughly 7 hours! a population equivalent to half the size of USA spends 7 hours daily on facebook...its GDP (if it were productive) would rank amongst the highest in the world!

This is just facebook... for the sake of conciseness, I am not going to mention the other social networks like orkut and myspace. Use your overactive imagination.

Twitter:
Some interesting facts were discovered by a sysomos study that can be found here: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

I shall make my conclusions after highlighting the stark contrast between social networks like facebook and social media sites like twitter.

• 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
• 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
• 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people and 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity

Now here is an intriguing question.

Looking at facebook statistics, one would think that every one has an amazing social experience online. but when you look at twitter statistics, the figures are pretty dismal. What could be the reason for this?
I will not try to qualify this rudimentary study as an exact science... so lets leave out the facts about the different types of business models they follow and the features they offer.

Here is the fundamental difference between the two: Twitter lets you know how many people are actually listening to (or reading) what you put out there. And thats where the reality sinks in...the answer is 'not a lot!'

So in conclusion:

• Sites like facebook thrive on the human misconception that their lives actually matter to a lot of people. In reality, they don't
• We are prone to thinking that social networking makes us great communicators. It doesn't: its just the equivalent of a group of langoor monkeys cackling to be heard
• And the last bullet point: Tweet less, live more!

Gimme a cup of hot coffee and stimulating conversation above facebook and twitter anyday!