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This is one of those chances for our readers to help with an informal survey of sorts. According to a report issued by Crowd Science and reported over at the GigaOm blog, 27 % of Twitter users access the service via a third party application like TweetDeck, Twhirl etc. etc. If you would be so kind we would like to hear how you access Twitter. If you use a third party app let us know which one and why. If you don’t use an app let us know and why. Why are we asking these questions? We’re just curious, I suppose.
Personally, I can’t imagine using Twitter on a consistent basis without one of these apps to keep somewhat of an order to things. The straight line presentation of the Twitter stream doesn’t match up with how I process things so I depend on these third party apps to make sense of it all. Of course, being more involved with the social media side of life than the average Joe and still discovering how to best use Twitter makes me wonder how daunting it must look to folks just getting on board.
The rest of the report addresses some of those concerns
- Four in 10 Twitter users said they prefer contacting friends using social media than over the phone
- On a daily basis, only a quarter of Twitter users tweet while 46 percent check status updates.
- 24 percent of registered Twitter users have either stopped tweeting since they first signed up or have never tweeted at all.
The 24% of users that are signed up but not using the service is the piece of data that everyone seems to sweep under the rug. Whenever you hear about Twitter user statistics most are quick to say that as much as 50% of the users don’t use the site to access the service. If these numbers are correct (and since they are market research we KNOW they have to be 
) then we shouldn’t be so quick to add to the numbers that are reported as to the size of the Twitterverse. I say that because if 27% of the users are not using the site to access the service but 24% of the accounts are, in essence, dead then it’s a virtual wash.
So back to our ‘poll’. How do you use Twitter? Site or app for access? Tweet daily? Never tweet? Don’t give a tweet? We are waiting for a little bird to help us out here.
