

Is Twitter saturated? - flavio87
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/

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javery
This is the 3rd time someone has posted something like this (once by the same
submitter <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880575>).

It's a fairly useless metric to look at second hand reports of twitter's
website traffic. If you have a bump in new users they would naturally use the
website, as some of them left and the users who stuck around learned how to
use 3rd party clients you would see a drop in website traffic.

Now does it signify that twitter isn't picking up new users at the same pace,
perhaps. But when you think about the last 12 months I am not sure how they
could sustain that pace (between Obama, Oprah, etc).

~~~
whopa
Where is there concrete evidence that a significant chunk of Twitter users use
3rd party apps?

Desktop apps have horrible conversion rates, and I don't see why Twitter apps
in particular have any reason to buck this trend. Whenever there are articles
like these about Twitter's traffic numbers, people always bring up 3rd party
app traffic making up the difference, but nobody ever provides any references
to back that up.

~~~
javery
[http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-
traff...](http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traffic-
is-10x-twitters-site/)

~~~
whopa
That's raw API traffic, not user numbers.

An app that polls Twitter every minute is of course going to generate a lot of
requests. But if only 10% of Twitter users use 3rd party apps, the web metrics
are still more meaningful than API use.

~~~
javery
Majority of Twitter users use a third party app:

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_t...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_third_party_clients_they_use.php)

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dasil003
On the one hand, I don't think Twitter numbers can be considered stable at
all, because it's not something that people _get_ right away. They also
haven't really defined themselves as a company, and the product has so many
directions it could go in, any of which could change the growth profile.

But on the other hand, Twitter is something that many people will always find
vapid and narcissistic. Facebook has been trying to push people in this
direction as well, but they have a compelling feature set that draws people in
even if that have to block half of their loud-mouthed friends. Twitter has
lots of potential (via their API if nothing else), but even if they can build
up their third-party ecosystem to rival Facebook, I don't think you can't
capture a mass market with a hodgepodge of tools that user's have to discover
and set up for themselves.

Frankly I think Evan and Biz should have sold in the spring.

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brandnewlow
So my startup uses Twitter as an extension of our news aggregator, as another
way to distribute links that "go popular" with our users.

Since June, we've kept up our same tweeting frequency and the quality of the
stories has even shot up a bit.

But referrals, click-thru's and retweets are down to about half of what they
were in August. We were scratching our heads about this for a while. Maybe a
lot of the folks living on Twitter over the summer, retweeting our stuff moved
on to some shiny new toy once fall hit?

~~~
steveklabnik
Are you using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed, or are you participating in
conversation?

~~~
jcromartie
> Are you using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed

Isn't that what it is? (totally serious here)

~~~
steveklabnik
If you just use it for that, you're missing out on a lot.

Yes, technically speaking, it's a glorified RSS feed. But due to the
presentation and the way people use it, it's more than that.

Check out, for example, the Dell Outlet. <http://twitter.com/DellOutlet> Dell
made $6.5 million from this Twitter account. Why? Because they actually engage
in discussions with their customers. It's an incredibly powerful way to reach
people that are buying your stuff. Part of the reason I'm still a Verizon
customer is because I got frustrated with their service, complained on
Twitter, and within 15 minutes, I got an @reply and then a dm from a rep, who
got actual real CSRs to call me, and my stuff got fixed.

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chanux
It's not just Twitter. <http://twittercism.com/twitter-growth-nov-09>

Is it "Social Networks"?

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deafmetal
Is this just visits directly to twitter.com? or does it reflect visits via
twitter's api?

~~~
FreeRadical
I presume it's direct visits. But looking at the charts for seesmic and
tweetdeck, if we assume the cumulative unique visitors to these two services
in the past year all downloaded and use the service at least once a month, it
adds maybe 5-10m users at a guess.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/seesmic.com+tweetdeck.com/>

~~~
mgrouchy
there are also a large group of people who only use twitter on their
iphones/blackberrys, its probably hard to say anything from stats from
compete.

~~~
Tiktaalik
This is equally true for Facebook, which isn't showing a declining trend.

~~~
joshfinnie
I think it is true that many people are updating their facebook status from
their phones, but I would guess that many of those same people are still going
to the website be it to look at photos they have recently been tagged in or
play Farmville.

I think the original comment was saying that many people strictly use twitter
from their phone or third-party app. There isn't much on twitter that draws an
established user to the website like there is with facebook.

~~~
mgrouchy
That is exactly what I meant, and that was exactly my point. Twitter wants to
become a service provider. It seems it doesn't care so much about you visiting
the site as much as it cares about you using the service it provides.

How this translates into twitter making money, we don't know yet, but it seems
like it is the direction they are going with Chirp(
<http://chirp.twitter.com/> ) and with talk of giving more developers access
to the firehose.

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momoro
fb's pageviews have flattened as well, according to compete.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com/>

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fjabre
Why do these numbers seem low..? I checked FB only to find that their monthly
uniques were 130 million.. Weren't they recently claiming 350 million active
users?

~~~
jfno67
If I remember right, Compete is only reporting user in the U.S. which explain
the low numbers.

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InclinedPlane
Considering that twitter experienced something like 500% growth in 2009, it's
probably for the best.

