

Twitter Data: An Investor's Perspective - jakestein
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/05/twitter-data-analysis-an-investors-perspective/

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jgrahamc
This is actually the perspective of someone who would like you to know about
his new company called RJMetrics.

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sachinag
Perhaps. But smart people know that this is good analyis:
<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/the-cohort-analysis.html>

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axod
>> "38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have
sent fewer than 10 tweets."

That's pretty damning. Are these accounts setup in the hope people will follow
them - honey pot style maybe? For spamming later.

>> Source = TXT: <5%

Since less than 5% are using sms to update twitter surely they can abolish the
outdated 140 character limit?

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gloob
_Since less than 5% are using sms to update twitter surely they can abolish
the outdated 140 character limit?_

Never having used it, I can't actually say, but I had the impression that the
140 character limit was the point of Twitter.

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axod
I guess to a certain extent, but for most use cases it just becomes irritating
and makes people use url shorteners, txt spk etc.

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jgrahamc
A few interesting points:

 _the average time between any two tweets from the same user is exactly 24
hours._

i.e. people use Twitter every day.

 _The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per
month._

Wow, only 8m new users per month. That's gotta hurt.

 _We know that Twitter has 50 million registered users_

OK, small user base then.

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ulf
the problem with the user base seems more likely to be that you can ignore
almost 75% of all users due to no activity

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far33d
Not exactly - twitter, unlike facebook, is asymmetric, so you expect a large
percentage of users who are just listening. That doesn't mean you can ignore
them - they are the audience.

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ulf
you're right about the asymmetry, but let's not pretend that 75% of 60M are
actively listening to anyone...

I would be stunned if that number was higher than 10%

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jonsteinberg
With any of these social platforms there is a small percentage of creators and
a large population of consumers. For example, look at Youtube. The same can
happen for twitter...a lot of people may just consume the tweets of
celebrities or other feeds. Low tweeting is not a big issue. The consumption
traffic continues to grow

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whopa
Low tweeting is a big issue, since it negates some of the Twitter narrative.
The whole "pulse of the planet" realtime search thing isn't really valuable if
most of the users aren't contributing to the corpus.

Also, if it's just a handful of the users creating the value, then the
switching costs are much lower. You'll go to "where the celebrities are"
(which may turn out to be Facebook, or something else) and not the harder to
move "where are your friends are".

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hussong
If those numbers are real, that's pretty deflating.

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phil
Huge increase in user growth rate this year means most users are new users.

New userbase + long average time between early tweets -> most users have < 10
tweets.

