**UPDATE**
Some more details from the survey can be seen in the presentation I gave this past week.
The report itself should be completed by Wednesday, and I have learned that it is to be published in the Online Journalism Review this summer!
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My Twitter Survey is up! If you are a Twitter user, please take the time to fill it out.
Although the survey was only posted yesterday, a few interesting trends are already beginning to develop in the response data (n=70 so far). Demographically there are few surprises (users tend to be young, urban and educated), but it was interesting to note that fully 75% of the sample are true Internet veterans (they claimed 10+ years of experience online). This, combined with the demographic details, seems to suggest that a large portion of Twitter’s users are twenty-something college grads who grew up with the Internet at home or in school.
More than half of the sample (~60%) started using Twitter within the past 6 months, and about the same number of users also Tweet daily or more. This would seem to bode well for the further growth of Twitter, as there have been periods in its use when a significant number of my followers started accounts, Tweeted something to the effect of “what’s all this, then?” and never posted again.
Finally, a key element that had held back my own participation in Twitter appears to have been dispatched with. Twitter has now reached some degree of ‘critical mass’ that has allowed new users to find their friends on the site. Nearly everyone in the sample said that they follow people that they know in real life, and a personal relationship was the second most common reason for deciding to follow a user. The social elements of Twitter were not ignored, either, with 70% of the sample indicating that they engage in @replies with other Tweeple (that aligns well with one of the main findings from my study of Identity Performance in microblogging last year). This should be a relief to the people at Obvious, because for a minute there it looked like Facebook Status Updates could usurp Twitter’s role as the lead microblogging platform.
I have reserved most of the juiciest bits of information from the survey, but don’t despair. Once I complete my study I’ll certainly be posting more details, and of course keep an eye out for the white paper that I am compiling this data for. If you’re interested for more footnotes and theory than one would ever dream of packing into a blog post, take a look at my dissertation for the London School of Economics on Identity Performance and Microblogging.