Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
blog.chrisricca.com
Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#2Very 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.
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#3Overall, 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.
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#4There 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.
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#5You 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?
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#6Graphing COMscore data vs media mentions would a better indicator of hype/popularity differential than google query volume vs media mentions.
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#7You 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?
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.
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#8On 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?
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#9here'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.
Re: Maybe Twitter isn't that popular...
#10To 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...)
To me it seems like Twitter just hasn't spread to the computer illiterate crowd, so this kind of graph is unsurprising.