For several months now, all we've heard is how Twitter's growth, once rapid, is flatlining. And all indications are from the various third-party measuring sources is that this is true. But Twitter co-founder Evan Williams just tweeted a little surprise for everyone today: Apparently, yesterday was Twitter's highest-usage day ever. And today will be even bigger, he continues.
While this is very interesting, it shouldn't be all that surprising. Twitter's new growth may be stalled, but the users that are already on the site seem to be using it more rabidly than ever. Remember too that a lot of the third-party measuring sites do not count the people who access and use Twitter through the service's APIs. That means that all the mobile clients, all the desktop clients, and also all those who simply use Twitter via text message are not counted.
For several months now, all we’ve heard is how Twitter’s growth, once rapid, is flatlining. And all indications are from the various third-party measuring sources is that this is true. But Twitter co-founder Evan Williams just tweeted a little surprise for everyone today: Apparently, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. And today will be even bigger, he continues.
While this is very interesting, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Twitter’s new growth may be stalled, but the users that are already on the site seem to be using it more rabidly than ever. Remember too that a lot of the third-party measuring sites do not count the people who access and use Twitter through the service’s APIs. That means that all the mobile clients, all the desktop clients, and also all those who simply use Twitter via text message are not counted.
The fact that there was nothing that huge happened news-wise yesterday is also a good sign for Twitter. Unless Twitter users are directly correlated with those who care about Mark McGwire and/or steroids, it would seem this was just a naturally huge day. Twitter is no stranger to seeing spikes of growth during huge events (Michael Jackson’s death, for example), but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
All that said, Twitter’s lack of web growth remains an issue because at the very least it means that there are probably less people signing up for the site than there once were. But some new numbers from Hitwise in December indicate that Twitter saw a bump (4%) in the right direction once again. Obviously, they’re going to want to build off of that.
Twitter’s news follows the news that another hot web property, Foursquare, saw record numbers recently as well.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Comments
Post a Comment