There's nothing like cautioning people against using your own product too much, but that's precisely what Twitter's (News - Alert) co-founder Biz Stone is doing. He recently said that spending up to 12 hours per day on the microblogging platform “unhealthy.”
Stone, who serves as Twitter's creative director, made his comments during a talk he gave at the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal business conference, according to UK newspaper The Guardian. He said that users should visit Twitter for information but leave once they had found it.
“I like the kind of engagement where you go to the website and you leave because you've found what you are looking for or you found something very interesting and you learned something,” said Stone. “I think that's a much healthier engagement. Obviously, we want you to come frequently.”
So is this becoming a concern...too many people spending too much time on Twitter? Well, there's certainly evidence that Americans are spending a whole lot of time on social networking. While Twitter doesn’t provide specific statistics on the average amount of time users spend on the site, says Mashable, others have attempted to do so. Web site traffic measurement service Alexa, which is owned by Amazin, says that users spend about four and a half minutes a day on Twitter. According to a 2009 report by Sysomos, says Mashable, only 1.13 percent of Twitter users update their accounts more than 10 times a day. About 85.4 percent of Twitter members tweet zero times a day and about 6.5 percent tweet once a day. These statistics would appear to suggest that there is a small but prolific number of “super users” who spend most of their free time on Twitter.
Despite his admonitions not to use it too much, Stone said he remains positive about the impact of social networking on the world.
“The more connected we get through all social media, the more humanity can move as one,” he said. “Maybe I’m just being hallucinogenically optimistic, but the idea that once we’re connected we’ll be able to move together, suggests we’ll be able to get a lot more done in a lot shorter time.”