

Maybe Twitter isn't that popular... - ChrisRicca
http://blog.chrisricca.com/post/428370632/maybe-twitter-isnt-that-popular

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Judson
To think about it, this isn't all that surprising

Facebook has to many users that a lot of people use google to get to Facebook
(some just blindly clicking on the first link:
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php))

To me it seems like Twitter just hasn't spread to the computer illiterate
crowd, so this kind of graph is unsurprising.

~~~
ChrisRicca
Navigational search definitely has a lot to do with the graph. I don't think
that's computer illiteracy, though. That's just how the normals use the
internet ;) We techies are the fringe.

<http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/>

I see the navigational search as an indication of mainstream adoption.

~~~
Judson
"navigational search"... I like that

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petewarden
On a related note, I've been on the partial Twitter firehose and I've only
seen around 5 million unique users over a couple of months. Granted this is
the _partial_ firehose, but I'd still expect the number of uniques to approach
the true number of active users over a long enough time period. I'm seeing
comparitively few new users at this point.

One other researcher I've talked to has similar results, anybody else
gathering data on this?

~~~
alexro
I'm on the several twitter streams, totaling to around 20% of all the tweets.
During a month I've got 8 million active users.

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kjbekkelund
Very interesting — and precisely what I would have guessed beforehand. Here in
Norway I see a lot of talk all the time about Twitter in the media, but nearly
none of my friends use it at all. The only time I heard _everyone_ talking
about Twitter was when living in San Francisco last summer.

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philwelch
You can't just use search engine queries as a proxy for popularity, especially
on something like a website. Is it possible that Twitter serves a more
technically savvy portion of users that knows how to use the address bar in
their browsers? Or that people are more interested in researching _about_
Facebook than Twitter even if they use both?

~~~
Qz
Even if you're right on all of those things, the difference in the numbers is
staggering, and what you're talking about can't really account for that big of
a difference.

~~~
philwelch
That's true--I think Facebook _is_ more popular than Twitter, but not
necessarily to the magnitude search query traffic would suggest.

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jasonlbaptiste
here's something else to put it into perspective. The other day ubuntu was a
trending topic. I understand it was a big release and all. I'm not a stats pro
by any means, but I just can't see how a "mainstream" application with 75
million+ users could have ubuntu as a trending topic.

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alexro
Overall, the graph is correct. But...

Twitter population is about 10 times smaller than of Facebook. Also, many
twitter-ers simply use a desktop/mobile client and not do anything Twitter-
related on the web.

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ivankirigin
There is a secondary effect with respect to the platform too. I made a startup
that served the Twitter platform market. It is very, very small compared to
facebook's platform.

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JacobAldridge
Here's an actual link to the trend -
[http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+twitter&ctab=...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2C+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1)

If you sort the Rank by Twitter, you'll see Brazil is the only place where
Twitter outranks Facebook, which I would attribute to the Orkut dominance that
pre-dated Facebook in that country.

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malloreon
Graphing COMscore data vs media mentions would a better indicator of
hype/popularity differential than google query volume vs media mentions.

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njharman
Comparing to Facebook is like comparing to people who breath air. Facebook is
ginormous, if you're 1/100th their size you are doing well.

And users are not everything (and people searching google are NOTHING).
Twitter has had huge impact News and News gathering. Facebook is/has
revolutionized the game industry (or created the casual games industry) POV.

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eli
Google Trends is an extremely poor source of data if you're trying to
extrapolate any real-world meaning.

~~~
teaspoon
I don't know where this presumption comes from that Trends numbers are an
accurate proxy for such-and-such metric. Even the more skeptical posts here
seem to admit that Trends for "twitter" vs. "facebook" would mirror those
services' market shares if it weren't for those net-illiterates googling for
the Facebook login page.

~~~
eli
Well, I guess I'm even more skeptical then them because even removing people
googling to get to a homepage, I think the numbers are only loosely correlated
to traffic/popularity in any meaningful sense.

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keltex
On a side note, with google "open" about so much, why doesn't the google
trends graph show absolute numbers rather than this arbitrary scale? I know
they're trying to protect their true business model (search+advertising), but
it would nice to share a little bit.

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Encosia
Almost all Facebook users use the Facebook.com web interface, while the
majority of Twitter users use a third party client or SMS. Comparing them by
search activity isn't reasonable.

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glhaynes
Many underestimate the difference caused by Facebook using Real Names while
Twitter uses @shortnames.

~~~
jrockway
And unless you explain this in some detail, many will continue to do that.

~~~
glhaynes
Well, it sets the 'tone' of the site. Just like the conversation will be
different with the same group of people depending on whether they're all
dressed in tshirts or if they're all dressed in formalwear... in each case,
they're the same people 'underneath', but the image each sees of others and
each's self-image will differ.

There's an additional layer of mapping added when using shortnames - the user
has to remember a whole list of "@donkey2001,Joe Smith" tuples; most people
(and especially non-geeks) like and operate better with fewer layers of
abstraction.

The usage of a full name on Facebook makes explicit the roughly one-to-one
correspondence between accounts and actual-people that is expected by users
and required by the service; Twitter users openly create multiple profiles
with different names and even identities, and the service and tools encourage
that. In that sense, Twitter has more of a sense of a masquerade or Halloween
party and less like a business meeting or high-school reunion.

Each has its strengths and its place, and the longer I use both, the less I
feel like there's direct competition between the two.

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zackattack
Call me racist and you'd be wrong, but urban blacks LOVE twitter and it has
become a serious part of their everyday social lives. Breakups, hookups, gang
wars -- it's on Twitter, and it's real.

~~~
cookiecaper
You know I've noticed this. Every single time I am convinced to check out
Twitter I found the great majority of the posts on trending topics to have
profile pictures of black people next to them. It is definitely an interesting
phenomenon.

~~~
_delirium
I've noticed that also, but I suspect it's mostly how people use twitter,
rather than the overall population of twitter users; i.e. black twitterers are
more likely than white twitterers to post in large public hashtags as a sort
of chatroom.

A study ([http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-
Statu...](http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-Status-
Updating-Fall-2009.aspx?r=1)) did find that 26% of blacks vs. 19% of whites
use "Twitter or another status update service", but it also found a large
correlation with age. Since black demographics skew younger than white
demographics, my guess is that the 7% racial gap would disappear if you
controlled for age.

