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Is Twitter saturated?

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Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#21

Post by Tiktaalik »

mgrouchy wrote: post #6
FreeRadical wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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.

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

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#22

Post by icey »

smikhanov wrote: post #4
deafmetal wrote: post #2

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

Even if it doesn't track the API, the plateau still reflects the declining amount of users signing up (those have to visit front page).

That argument doesn't make sense to me - what if people adopt 3rd party Twitter clients faster than the rate of new signups? You would have a net loss in web traffic even if new-user growth was increasing.

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#24

Post by joshfinnie »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #21
mgrouchy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#25

Post by whopa »

javery wrote: post #7

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 traff…

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.

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#26

Post by javery »

whopa wrote: post #25
javery wrote: post #7

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 traff…

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 u…

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traff...

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#27

Post by whopa »

javery wrote: post #26
whopa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traff...

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.

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#28

Post by mgrouchy »

joshfinnie wrote: post #24
Tiktaalik wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#29

Post by mgrouchy »

brandnewlow wrote: post #20
steveklabnik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it's possible that people got bored and unsubscribed. I have no real idea, just throwing some ideas out there.

We've gained followers over same period.

An increase in followers is not the same as an increase in engagement.

Re: Is Twitter saturated?

#30

Post by javery »

whopa wrote: post #27
javery wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traff...

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.

Majority of Twitter users use a third party app:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_t...

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