Twitter Quitters Post Roadblock to Long-Term Growth

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-to-long-term-growth/
This article talks about how even though in the past few months twitter has gained huge numbers of subscribers it is also hemorrhaging users. Apparently in the past year twitter has had about 30 percent retention rate and wonders if twitter will be able to live up to the hype and its future in the social networks hall of fame.
I don't really understand twitter and its existence (and this is coming from someone who is on facebook 24/7) so I think I would probably end up being a twitter quitter if i ever decided to sign up and don't really get how it helps businesses and the like.

I think most normal people really do not understand what's so fun about following a random person and reading their status updates. I myself am not into using a lot of other social networks, but at least spending time on facebook is much more reasonable then spending time on twitter. On facebook you can at least see pictures, see videos, and read more than 140 characters of writing. Twitter on the other hand, has nothing to really offer anyone who leads a non-boring life.

If we think about twitter in terms of our class, we can sort of determine what is the threshold for their to be additional new users to Twitter as well as the retention of users. Based on what we learned in class, a change in behavior in a network only occur if a particular fraction of a nodes neighbors are already using that behavior, then that node will also begin using this behavior. I guess for twitter, this has to be a very high threshold because at least speaking from first hand experience, it takes more than two friends in a set of friends to get others to start using Twitter. I guess overall Twitter will eventually even out in the number of users it will have and it will become a very tightly closed network structure. Chances are it won't have many weak ties to other clusters, like those that are Facebook users, so the use of Twitter won't spread.

I've mentioned this article in a different post, but it seems relevant to here as well, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30769388/ . Based on the article and what we've learned in class, I think its safe to say that Twitter will eventually be used for very specialized reasons by a very high density cluster, that will likewise prevent more widespread use of twitter.