Only 175M of 500M? The people are Techcrunch are so out of touch with reality. That's more than 20% of users. If 20% of all your users are active, you should be commended.
I agree that's a lot, but we need to bear in mind that active can have a lot of definitions. From the article:
"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower or tweeting"
Three months is a long time for activity - monthly / weekly / daily active user metrics are more common. Also, it (apparently) isn't counting a visit as activity, just these actions. That just makes this a weird metric to benchmark against.
Facebook is another one I've wondered about. It was common practice for anyone I knew who was playing Zynga games that they'd create second, third, and fourth FB accounts, as you received perks for having friends playing the game along with you.
This wildly skewed those 'accelerated growth' numbers that led to the over evaluation of both FB and ZNGA.
I'm curious, once everything shakes out, if all these companies earning extravagant evaluations on the backs of the number of users they have will be audited, or taken to court for gross negligence, as they 'had it within their capability' to find out if people were creating fake accounts. Of course, that would be incredibly hard to prove, but a lot of people have already, and will continue to lose money on these investments as their practices become more well known.
Semi-related: What's preventing FB from artificially creating users themselves - to make their network look gigantic. I feel like FB would not be able to continue the growth it has - which begs the question, if they faked it internally, would we know? /tinfoil.
I for once have at least create five to ten Facebook accounts myself, Each time I get into a situation where I am forced to use Facebook I create a new throw away account. As I have a deep distaste for Facebook's approach to privacy and overall business practice these unavoidable logins occur only every few month or so. I think creating and abounding accounts might be the least useful user interaction they can get.
So what qualifies an active user ? I have a twitter account and even though I have never tweeted (yet) I do follow a bunch of people and regularly read up on what they have to say. I am sure there are several more like me.
"active in this sense means the number of accounts that were modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar, subscribing to a new follower or tweeting".
In any real world analysis, you are completely right. However in the tech hype center, it is a troublesome sign. Most people would be happy to even get a quarter of that number.
A significant portion of Silicon Valley has gone all in on the social web. With Facebook smarting from their IPO debacle, and Zynga slowly marching toward penny stock status, Twitter is their last great "social" hope. And this is not just VC's either, as the entire Valley has built a massive ecosystem about everything social web. Should Twitter falter, it will wash out a massive portion of capital on the scale not seen since the first dot com bust.
In this context, 170MM active users is not so great. The bar has been set at 1 billion real, active users. This is especially when one looks at visits and engagement, where Facebook is still very much dominant.
With Instagram out of the picture, Foursquare stalling, Path seen as small potatoes and Pinterest's potential questionable, Twitter is really the last massive, independent social tech play left.
170M actives is not that bad at in my opinion, but 170M out of 500+M is quite strange. And yet, we have to remember twitter is much more suitable for brands and celebrities than it is for the "normal"-less-known people
170M out of 500M seems pretty normal for me, in fact, better than most sites, hip social network startup or otherwise. In most online communities I'd expect the active/inactive ratio to be worse.
Twitter seems great for celebrities. Not being a celebrity, however, my experience with twitter has been one of extreme isolation. I'd bet most of my followers are either bots or marketers. The rest are mostly strangers with whom I share no common interests.
The result feels like standing on an empty street corner and shouting to one in particular. There's no interaction and no indication that anyone is reading anything I post, ever.* At least on HN or reddit, I get near instant feedback on just about everything I post.
* I did get a response from Darude one time, which was pretty cool.
This is similar to my experience. It probably depends on how many people you already know and who are willing to interact with you on that basis to give you a good start. I am still trying to get into this but the problem is that I often end up falling back into some "broadcasting" mode instead of engaging into conversations. Depending on your personality and pseudo popularity it is difficult and takes a lot of time and effort.
I think what makes my experience a little bit different is that many of my real-life friends and family use twitter. And most of them use it fairly regularly, much more so than Facebook. It actually makes me feel closer to them (as close as "status updates" can make you).
Coincidentally I don't follow any mainstream celebrities. But I do follow several prominent figures in technology.
I agree. Twitter always felt weird for me because of its broadcasting nature. Makes sense if you are a celebrity or a business and you need to make an announcement or something to a lot of people but not for me. There is so much junk and noise around these days that I'm struggling and always on search to find quality content. Since the rise of internet everyone has been empowered to be a writer, as opposed to older times where you'd need to be more committed to publishing to be able to publish anything in the first place. The quality has diluted, the volume has increased many times and we are busier than before, that's why things like Twitter doesn't really appeal to me.
When I finally broke down and signed up with Twitter over a year and a half ago, my first half dozen handle choices - all based on my fairly unusual given name were taken by what appeared to be placeholders. (No profile, few is any tweets/followers/following and nothing recent).
I'm surprised that 34% are active. I'd have guessed at something more like 5-10%.
I have 6 accounts, and use just 1, and that too once every 2-3 months.
I'm guessing the active accounts follow a Zipfian distribution; and probably the most active ones are bots and corporate accounts (managed by teams of people).
For some reason people say RSS is dead but have a love affair with twitter. I like you use it for consumption and to produce consumable links with tag lines. For example my http://www.twitter.com/pdrintel has 711 followers (a lot for me)and has only tweeted 488 times a ratio of posts to followers could show quality -
What I don't understand is how its any different than RSS besides size limit in content and easiness to sign up to follow someone.
- I find more useful as a producer of content; than a consumer of content. I also find it has more parallels to RSS than anyone would want to admit.
What do you mean? If they're logged out they're not active. Changing data (user info?) shouldn't matter because that's not how active users are checked.
The problem is that the analysis can't measure logged out accounts. Instead, they measure activity. From the article:
...active in this sense means the number of accounts that were
modified over a three-month period, including changes of avatar,
subscribing to a new follower or tweeting, says Guyot.
“We believe this is close to a monthly login rate,” he tells me.
So they are assuming if you haven't done anything, you aren't logged in.
I rarely tweet and I don't think I've ever changed my avatar. I do follow or unfollow accounts, but I'm pretty sure I could find a few three months spans in my account history where I haven't.
I generally check Twitter a couple of times a day from a logged in account, but based on the above criteria I would be considered 'inactive'.
