March 16, 2009

Twitter, that irresistible force and leading light of web 2.5 (Participative+Realtime) never ceases to amaze me. It’s not the platform that gathers my admiration as much as the freedom it tenders to its users for content expression.

Sure, everybody knows that it is on FaceBook’s radar; the new “What’s on your mind?” homage to Freud and cohorts sends the message loud and clear. Sure, everybody knows it is a potential threat to Google for what I like to call “situational” news and views. It rarely gets more succinct or original than what Twitteronia can Summize ;).

But here’s a prediction -

Should Twitter continue to grow globally, and establish even a semblance of sustainability - it will become a viable indicator of some key economic productivity metrics.

A core metric of Twitter user behavior is needed:

Updates Per 24-hour Day (UPD)

Once we have an UPD, we can go ahead and track it temporally (Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly). To improve quality, any Twitteronians having a Followed:Following ratio of > 5:1 need to be eliminated as they are likely to have commercial or personal interests unlikely to be swayed by economic conditions.

This then leaves the “normal” Twitteronians. Users participating in the social mesh, but only to share with and learn from their microcosm.

My guess is that the mean UPD for a country’s “normal” Twitter population will decline as GDP improves.

Therefore, UPD is inversely proportional to a country’s service productivity.

I don’t expect this to be much of an indicator for the manufacturing industry until Twitter truly permeates through our social fabric.

Extrapolating that further - I see search query volumes increasing on Twitter, along with the number of users, but I see fewer status updates per user as the economy turns around.

Ofcourse, this is a very basic statistical model, there is plenty of room to add probabilistic correlations here to the tune of “Number of asymettric follows per day” and others.

Let’s see how it rolls. Maybe we’ll be able to use the real-time web to predict recession / growth curves. Perhaps there will be a future where it doesn’t take 2 successive quarters of negative GDP to signal a recession - I’m strapped in for the ride!

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