Apparently so, based on two recent studies. In the first, I’m once again honored to be included in a ranking by the Technobabble 2.0 blog, which is written by Jonny Bentwood, an analyst relations guru at Edelman PR in the UK. His latest ranking is called the Top Analyst Twitters (Micro-Bloggers). 
Earlier this year, my blog was chosen (for the second time) as one of his Top 100 Analyst Blogs, and now it’s great to be recognized in this newest ranking — at #18. As Bentwood said in his latest post, "It is not a massive shock that the people who have scored highest are the same as those who use blogging to great affect."
Technobabble’s methodology for its Twitter ranking was based on four data points, which were then weighted. 
The data points were 1) number of followers; 2) number of updates, which is what posts are called on Twitter; 3) conversation, or how many people have engaged in conversation with each analyst; and 4) "Technobabble points," the only personal, subjective measure in the algorithm, said Bentwood, with those scoring the highest in this category "having frequent, relevant, and high-quality content — asking questions, posting links or commenting on discussions." The following weightings were then used to come up with each analyst’s score: Followers=30%, Updates=15%, Conversations=30%, and Technobabble Points=25%.
In an earlier study, a few weeks ago, Louis Gray asked What’s Your Twitter Noise Ratio? He said this in his blog post, explaining how he came to do his study: "I feel there are different categories of Twitter users, from those who
have a listening audience, measured by a high ‘followers’ to ‘updates’
ratio, those who are engaging, seen with near equal ‘followers’ and ‘updates’, and those who are more noisy, with a lot more ‘updates’ than
actual ‘followers’."
He explained how he did his analysis: "Taking a look at 48 Twitter users I either
follow or engage with, I found the average number of ‘tweets’ per ‘follower’ was almost exactly 1, measuring at 1.02. But the ratio of
updates to followers varied widely, from the sleepy 0.06 to the firehose-like 9.75." I left a comment on Louis’ post, noting I was very glad to see, upon calculating my tweets-to-follower ratio, that it was 4.84, ranking me quite high in his "Converationalists" category.
In another article just published today, How Valuable Are You on Twitter?, Daniel Terdiman of CNet examines the topic from some other angles, including Twitter coverage of the China earthquake, and citing the opinions of other some leading observers and Twitterers in regard to measuring the value of this new micro-blogging medium.
What do you think? How do you use Twitter? Is it valuable to you? In what ways?
Twitter reminds me a lot of IRC channels. One difference is that you get to pick your “channel” by choosing people that you twitter/speak with versus choosing a common topic area. I think the same type of analysis could have been done on IRC channels… some people simply lurked, some people sort of participated, and others were always on and chatting.
To me, twitter is like social networking meets IRC, and although I’m fairly new to twittering, I think it’s use comes more from the IRC aspect of its lineage where you can ask questions, get answers, find new relevant information from links posted, etc…
Also, I liked your write up of Minnebar. I linked to it on Twitter!
Thanks, RR. I was never really a user of IRC, but I know several people who have been been into it bigtime. It’s more a developer thing, I know.
But that’s an interesting angle I haven’t heard before — maybe the founders of Twitter got their inspiration from IRC? Like taking it one step further and making it UI-friendly … for the masses, huh?
Glad you liked my Minnebar coverage — thanks for the link! And I see we’re already following each other on Twitter… 🙂
cheers,
Graeme
Hey Graeme,
Yeah, it’s possible that IRC was an inspiration. It’s hard to tell if they just saw dollar signs, looking to capitalize on the social networking craze, or if they were really trying to make something of value! Right? Haha…that might be a little cynical… 😉 I make that joke because I find myself thinking about dollar potential often times more than the value of something I’m working on.
But to push a little further, I could see twitter evolving to having topics that people follow (as well as people) to which they can message things of relevancy and more easily follow related tweets. That setup would create kind of virtual rooms that would be more similar to an IRC channel. But who knows…just speculation…
-R
good stuff, RR…I like the way you speculate
g