Are you a Talker or a Listener?

OK, it's sort of a Sophie's Choice. But I've been thinking a lot about what makes people share things about themselves on Twitter or Facebook that they might not shout across a subway car full of strangers. First, what is the basic personality trait that makes us want to expose ourselves at all? Second, what is the difference between what I might say semi-anonymously on the web vs. what I might say with attribution on the web vs. what I might say in line at Dunkin' Donuts. In fact, it's this last piece that intrigues me the most - the difference between what we share online vs. in the real world, but that's for a later discussion.

If you do a quick review of the Twitter topic #WhyITweet, you get an unsurprisingly large number of people who pretty much admit Tweeting because they like to talk. They are using a legitimate outlet for expression or they are pure narcissists. I won't attempt to assign a reason to it, but am just acknowledging the concept that some people just want to express themselves. But there is a smaller number of people who are doing other things - sharing and listening for trends, conversing with colleagues and strangers, promoting themselves, etc. In the end, though, my own experiences using Twitter seem to suggest that people who like to talk are more likely to use services like this.

OK, you might be thinking, "Duh, Bill, that's no huge insight." But I think it is. In the end, a platform like Twitter will only succeed if there are a lot of people who like to talk (or produce content) AND a lot of people who like to listen (consume content) and that there is a balance between the two. It doesn't have to be 50/50 but if a tree falls in the forest...or if you're Tweeting and no one is listening...

There is a big idea in this seemingly obvious idea and I'm still working on what it means and thinking of the right way to frame the questions to get to good answers. So I've created a poll on PollDaddy to ask this simple question and am curious to see the results. Please take this poll and help me to understand a bit more about the world.