Data junkies

Earlier I asked a quick question on Twitter, how many tabs did people currently have open in their browser. At the end of a day I might have up to 70 tabs open but I expected that to be a big exception since I do almost daily Fluffy Links and those tabs are the raw material. I expected maybe 5-6 tabs to be the average of people. The numbers are extraordinary.

The numbers:
7, 9, 7, 9, 60, 25, 8, 39, 64, 5, 4 (on phone), 1, 2, 2, 17, 10, 8, 1, 40, 30, 19, 12, 1 (phone), 147, 46, 7, 11, 14, 15 (phone), 1 (phone), 3, 12, 2, 5, 13, 11, 12, 12, 17, 115, 11, 5, 17, 13, 10, 6

A hell of a lot of double digits and even some triple digits there.

Twitter users are no doubt data junkies so these numbers are probably much higher than general web users. A question to ask though is with all these tabs open it’s even harder again to get the attention of someone. They click a link to your website, it opens in a new tab, they glance for a few seconds and then go elsewhere. At the end of the day do they come back and go through the site or just close the tab? From my own experience, my time online is spent with my head dug into GMail, Twitter, Bloglines and Facebook. Twitter and Bloglines are the sources of the tab openings.

So I wonder whether it’s obvious SEO is vital for most people but whether to get the attention of the 150,000 data junkie Irish Twitter users whether you need to do more to get their attention when they only have continuous partial attention.

Squirrel begging
Photo owned by sparkle1103 (cc)

12 Responses to “Data junkies”

  1. SAm Crea says:

    What about us who now have win 7 and superwide-Screens. Two browsers open side by side and god knows how many tabs…

  2. Ian Healy says:

    I would normally have a good few open, except the last few Firefox builds keep freezing horribly. Think I’ll switch over to Chrome. Lose all my windows every day

  3. James says:

    Should have asked how many web browsers do you have open as well (4 for me earlier) though only about 20+ tabs open I think

  4. Sabrina says:

    I lobbed in with one of those “7” digits and was going to say (but not in 140 characters) that the fact you asked on a weekend may skew the results. In which direction, I’m not sure, but I suspect fewer tabs on a weekend than a week day.

  5. Paul Kennedy says:

    Mien Gott, that’s waaaaaaay too many tabs. Course I’m a serial tab closer (I can only handle about 2 at a time – I never keep tabs open that I’m not using).

    If I’m working on a project or blog that needs researching then maybe 5 to 8 would be a max, but even then I just keep them open till I can paste the url in somewhere.

    Course, if Tweetdeck counts as a tab then that’s one split into 12 or so groups.

  6. I can’t do it. Too many tabs or windows open and I loose focus.
    It might be worth looking at the process of tamara gielen http://www.tamaragielen.com who does something very similar to Fluffy Links. At Bizcamp Belgium she described how she saves open tabs to delicious with a snippit of text. This is then automatically posted to wordpress once a day and a link to the post is automatically tweeted.
    It sounds a lot more managable πŸ™‚

  7. Cormac says:

    I think I might be reading this wrong:”So I wonder whether it’s obvious SEO is vital for most people” but does SEO have to do with the multiple tabs? Is not more content conversion?

  8. Phil says:

    Minimum of 50 over the last year…

  9. James says:

    And people wonder why Firefox keeps on crashing πŸ˜€

  10. Emma says:

    I can’t keep more than a few open or my pc freezes and crashes πŸ™

  11. TUG says:

    “So I wonder whether it’s obvious SEO is vital for most people but whether to get the attention of the 150,000 data junkie Irish Twitter users whether you need to do more to get their attention when they only have continuous partial attention.”

    The real question is whether you need the attention of 150,000 Irish Twitter users, data junkies or not…

  12. lisadom says:

    That perhaps explains why my Hammie’s Blog stats run to 2-3 pages and 5 minutes of viewing per visitor, on average. And the Irishautismaction blog stats are less than 60 seconds and rarely more than one page. People are flicking off to the links and not coming back to irishautismaction. But Hammie’s visitors are totally different and unlikely to flit off to visit any links.

    xx