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More than 50 million tweets a day flow through our timelines. Could anyone read every one of them?
Has Twitter reached critical mass? At Death and Taxes, one writer took a stopwatch to a scroll through his Twitter feed. He reports it took an average of 6.6 seconds to read each tweet. This adds up to a huge 330 million seconds – equaling about 10 years – to give a cursory glance to all the tweets in a single day. And forget about clicking on links – that can only drive up your reading time and will most certainly distract you from the task at hand. (but then again, isn’t Twitter inherently a distraction?)
(More on TIME.com: See how Twitter is changing the way we live.)
Even if we left off the estimated 40% that are spam or meaningless chatter, that would still be an endeavor of six years per day to wade through the news and conversations that spread in 140 characters or less.
Not even NewsFeed has that kind of time to waste on the Internet.