Is Twitter Flattening? A Short Answer

Compete and Quantcast have now released their latest data about the traffic on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for December.

According to Compete’s report, twitter.com’s US traffic reached 22.81 million unique visitors in December, up 1.45% from November. This is still below its peak in June. MySpace continued to drop, slowing to 49.33 million unique visitors, while Facebook reached 132.13 million unique visitors in December, up from 128 million in November.

This led to a number of blogs repeating the refrain: Facebook grows, MySpace shrinks, and Twitter stalls. Is that the case?

As we all know quite well, Twitter.com is only a fraction of total Twitter activity. To say emphatically that if Twitter.com stalls, the service stalls, is the height of ignorance. It is difficult to find reliable statistics measuring Twitter client traffic. TweetStats analyzes just over one million of the 27 million tweets produced daily. The selected tweets are fed by Gnip, so one cannot fully assess the statistical quality of the sample, but we can assume that they are quasi-random. TweetStats shows that twitter.com is used for a third of the traffic, leaving two thirds fully unaccounted for in the Compete and Quantcast reports.

Data produced from Twitstat shows that twitter.com captures 19.32% of the users, and generates 19.72% of the tweets, down by about 1% from November. In short, Twitter.com’s share decreased, and the overall Twitter usage increased via 3^rd party applications.

The same data shows TweetDeck and Tweetie posting solid numbers, but more interestingly, it shows two fast-growing clients: HootSuite and FourSquare. Hootsuite aims at professionals –marketing, search, communication, PR; FourSquare is the mobile app that lures you and people around you into a game on their platform. This is good news for Twitter; it shows that businesses are getting serious about Twitter, right when the startup is ready to offer paying services for higher volume users and in-depth analytics. It also shows that users respond very positively to Twitter apps on mobile. Mobile is the future of Twitter, with its money-making opportunities via tailored push services, referring and analysis, search, and ads.

For those that want to read the demise of Twitter by comparing it to Facebook, a few points to consider:

• Facebook did not reach 350 millions active users and 132 million unique monthly visitors right away. Facebook started in February 2004. In June 2006, MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the US. In April 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace. In the past 18 months Facebook grew tremendously because it somehow reached a critical mass, after which everybody wanted to be part of it. Twitter experienced the same phenomenon, and it continues to grow, albeit at a much slower rate.
• Facebook does not subsume Twitter. The concept of “update” spreads from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, but this will not make Twitter obsolete. Twitter’s modus operandi is different from Facebook and LinkedIn, because it is an asymmetric network that allows people to listen, express, and share without reciprocity. Also Twitter’s concise format is great for to-the-point info and recommendation-based grading. I am a user of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and I use these services in a completely different way.

That does not mean that Twitter can lay back and relax. Their growth is much slower than before, and they need to attract a new wave of users if they want to fulfill their promises. How about addressing the following:

• Uptime and stability. Enough said.
• Lists are great, but where are the tools to easily build them? Nobody wants to build a list by adding users one by one. This is not rocket science. I want to copy, add/remove multiple items, merge, and intersect easily.
• Provide user search capabilities. I hate to have to visit 5 different sites to find experts that can answer my questions, or to find a community I can follow to be informed and/or educated on some subject.
• Ranking system. Anybody can buy 100,000 followers for a few bucks, isn’t that about time to provide some way of assessing the relevance of tweets and users by other means that the sheer number of followers?

Twitter has been great for developing a rich eco-system with hundreds of clients to read and send tweets, as well as analyze, search, and manage tweets and users. But some consolidation would help factorizing the effort and would result in a much better user experience, which can only appeal to the non-geeky, non-professional, mainstream user. It is time for Twitter to shake up and go to the next step.

Discussion - 15 Comments/Pingbacks RSS feed for comments on this post

1. 

   Damon says January 12, 2010

   Reply

   Hi there – TweetStats guy here. I collect data from Gnip, which ends up being approximately a few million status updates/day. It’s a pretty random sample of tweets and I simply calculate usage on a daily basis.

   Hope that helps,

   Damon

   • 

     Olivier Coudert says January 12, 2010

     Reply

     Hi Damon,

     Great, thanks for answering my question. Then it makes your data all relevant! How is made the sample of tweets? What if the client is unknown –is it mapped on web or other?

     • 

       Damon says January 13, 2010

       Reply

       I’m not entirely sure how the sample is made, I’m just picking up the data from Gnip. In the near future, I’m planning to move to Twitter’s sample stream as it will be more reliable/significant/etc.

       When a client is unknown, Twitter maps it to “API”. “web” refers to tweets coming directly from twitter.com. I should mention in the past, unknown clients were attributed to “web”, but that changed sometime last year to “API”.

2. 

   Casey Cheshire says January 12, 2010

   Reply

   Excellent article. The key point for Twitter is that the majority of it’s activity is through the API into great desktop, mobile, and now TV applications.

3. 

   @udeme says January 13, 2010

   Reply

   To say that Twitter should take things to the next level (simply to add more users or try to catch up with other social networks) misses the point. The ecosystem’s optional-receprocity appraoch may never completely translate to the entire MySpace/Facebook crowd.

   Because the core users of Twitter are info hounds (as opposed to socialites), it probably will never match Facebook’s user base in terms of numbers. While (almost) everybody has a brother, sister, friend, old classmate, co-worker, boss, employee, wife husband etc (re:Facebook), not everyone may be so passionate (or even mildly interested enough) in a particular field to follow the info streams of virtual strangers.

   Twitter may always be smaller than Facebook, and frankly, that’s just fine by me.

   Note: @ev just confirmed that Twitter just had its two highest activity days (yesterday & today) so its quite clear its far from flattening.

4. 

   Flashtweet says January 13, 2010

   Reply

   From what we have seen and as a company offers a tool that allows individuals to businesses connect with more people, twitter users have been expanding exponentially. Even schools are integrating twitter usage to their system.

   Link: http://flashtweet.com/blog/for-nonbelievers-social-media-business-booming/

   Link: http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2215

5. 

   Sency says January 14, 2010

   Reply

   Twitter will grow in traffic when breaking news happens. Our real time engine http://sency.com/ continues to take off whenever there is breaking news happening

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