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April 29, 2008

End Of Speculation: The Real Twitter Usage Numbers

Michael Arrington

155 comments »

Speculation about Twitter’s new round of financing is leading everyone to speculate on Twitter’s actual penetration into the “mainstream,” or lack thereof.

Hitwise says web visits have increased 8x in the last year, albeit from a minuscule base. Compete shows about 900,000 U.S. monthly website visitors. Comscore puts the worldwide number at 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in March.

None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients like Alert Thingy, MySocial24×7 and Twhirl. Many of Twitter’s most active users rarely visit the website.

The key measure of Twitter usage is total users, total active users and total messages sent. And according to a source close to the company, these are the current Twitter usage stats:

March 2008
Total Users: 1+ million
Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there are many more registered users (see comments below). It may be users who’ve left at least one message, or an active user number that is over a longer period than the weekly number (monthly, for example). Those stats have roughly doubled just since January, when Twitter had just 100,000 active weekly users. Previously it took nine months to double in size - In April 2007 the service had 50,000 active weekly users. What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users - they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.

The company has not blessed these numbers, nor do I expect them to. If they respond to my email request for comment I’ll post an update here.

Update: Twitter declined to comment.

Update 2: Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider adds another interesting stat. There are 4 million connections between Twitter users (Twitterers following other Twitterers, with some duplication obviously), based on a slightly higher number of 1.3 million total users three weeks ago.

CrunchBase Information
Twitter
Information provided by CrunchBase
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Vinay

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    I am pretty sure, the numbers presented now would eventually double in forthcoming months. Not only is the application addictive, the third-party services around Twitter are growing at rapid speed making users to join and be active in Twitting!

  2. David

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:12 pm

    Much higher than I expected.

  3. Nicole Simon

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    Seeing how many people do use more than one account for different reasons, that makes the users number even lower than that.

  4. Dave

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    Great numbers and growth, but how will it be monetized enough to get back that huge valuation that’s expected by its investors?

  5. Alex Klein

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    Funny that I was directed to this post via Twitter itself. One giant feeding another — not a bad thing, I guess.

  6. no gphone

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    Arrington, you’re delusional. twitter isnt popular, i dont know ANYONE who knows what twitter is, but im sure you do considering the only people who use it are usually employed in California or any other “valley”

  7. Greg Skluzacek

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    Mike,

    Those are some cool stats, but they’re only useful if compared to something else. Can you let us know the stats of some other social networking sites to make the data more useful.

    Thanks,
    – Greg

  8. Stepan Mazurov

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    Wow, these are a lot lower than I expected, I suppose the activity doesn’t translate into unique users. What is a lot more surprising is how much they grew since January, those are impressive growth numbers. No doubt that twhirl and other 3rd party apps helped that out.

  9. Carter F Smith

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    Wow - the user/active ratio is a lot better than Second Life and MySpace . . . wonder if it has something to do with the time is takes just to use it? :-)

  10. Loren Feldman

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    Twitter Is Not Important 

  11. fred2baro

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    So it’s 20% users , what’s the big deal and “only one million users accross the world. it’s certainly going to grow much bigger. My question is : is this the twitter week , theyre is such amazing for few days now. Is this only about the internal founding or more ? what’s comming next ? Is twitter going to replace phone ? .. really …

  12. video contest

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    @Alex. I had the same thought.

  13. Brad Jashinsky

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    I thought the total user number was nearly 7 million. I know at least TwitterHolic says I was the 6 million+ user to sign-up.

  14. Michael Arrington

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    Greg - my guess is Twitter does more messages per day than have been done on Pownce forever.

  15. Peter Urban

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:18 pm

    Comment on TechCrunch: Tehe Real Twitter Numbers 

  16. solacetech

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    Twitter’s adaptability is it’s most powerful asset. With “qwerty” smartphones getting more and more affordable, mainstream will only be a matter of time. Wait until there’s a Silverlight twitter app…

  17. James

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:20 pm

    To look at this from a different perspective, these numbers actually seem really low to me, given twitter’s well publicised stability and performance issues.

    How are they struggling to handle that load!? 2 million 140 character messages == not a lot of data. Yes, they have several input and output formats to deal with but come on… It’s surely a small enough problem that you can just throw some servers at it with some of that $5.4m

  18. Michael Arrington

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:22 pm

    Brad - I’m not sure how the “total” number is being calculated. That may be people who’ve sent at least one message, for example. looking into it.

  19. tom

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    from looking at userid’s it looks like they are currently around 14million

    Last may when I registered userid’s where around 5 million.

    Ratio of actives to registered? Is this low or high for a site like this? What does facebook/myspace do?

  20. solacetech

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    OK, the Video comments are cool. Arrington, you rock…

  21. Ferodynamics

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    If Compete is right, my personal blog is 1/3 as large as Twitter according to Adsense. And I’m just one guy without financing.

  22. Will Johnston

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    I think the idea that Twitter will never catch on outside of Silicon Valley is probably shortsighted. While most of the people who I know who use it are techs, I definitely know (in real life, not just via Twitter) a few non-tech people who use it, one of whom uses it quite profusely.

    As others begin to adopt Twitter, non-tech communities will develop. At some point, I would imagine you’ll find people posting links to great cooking tips and asking baking questions, in the same way you can do that with tech issues now.

  23. Nathan

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    Is this The Unofficial Twitter Weblog or techcrunch.com…the lines have become blurred and I am no longer certain. Enough posts about twitter…you’re obsessed and your news is getting diluted.

    20 articles this month are on twitter. ENOUGH!

  24. Tim G

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

    I think the video comments are gimmicky and will end up being ignored for the most part. They’ll be ignored by me anyway. Unless of course their is a hint of breasts under that big play button (not Arringtons).

  25. Jason

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm

    Nathan, news is news. These numbers are much lower than I expected.

  26. JC

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    I KNOW that there are 3,780,000 users on Twitter, and i can prove it! Sounds like spam, but i have a way…serious, that is how many they have.

  27. Michael Arrington

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:39 pm

    JC - show us how you are getting to that number.

  28. Ferodynamics

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:40 pm

    FYI, “visitors” metrics are misleading because nobody agrees if that’s a unique IP for the hour, day, month, etc. Most stats programs look back a few hours for IP matches, that’s it. It’s not like they take an entire month of data, sort it and drop duplicates.

  29. Brad Jashinsky

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    Thanks Mike for taking a look. The first time I saw TwitterHolic’s numbers I was suprised that many people were using Twitter. When I look at number of users where I live I see about 20 users for a 100,000 population. That seems pretty small compared to other services. Might just be the city though.

  30. Ferodynamics

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    JC sounds like he’s kidding, I think that was sarcasm.

  31. jimmy

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    @no gphone you sir, are uneducated. do some more poking around.

  32. jb

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    okay now for my traditional post every time Arrlington does an article Twitter (which I think is about once a day now)… TWITTER IS STUPID. Get over it. It is a feature of Facebook that cannot be monetized and no one outside tech geeks use it.

  33. Chacha102

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:53 pm

    Twitter is really great at what it does. With just a few adjustments to be made to the API (AuthSub?). It is one of those programs that works the way you want. But once it needs to advertise or other money making schemes is really what is going to hurt it in the long run. When it comes to advertising, I really don’t want to have Ad Tweets messaging me, or having ads added to the end of an entry.

  34. Robert Seidman

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:02 pm

    jb, for now, and for a while, you’re going to have to hear about Twitter here because at least several thousand in the Twitterati seem to read every story published about it. It’s apparenly good for blog traffic whether you’re a huge site like Arringtons or one that’s smaller. Otherwise…we wouldn’t hear much about it at all. Twitter is this years Segway — another product loved by the digerati that got massive media coverage for a while.

    I’m guessing when the new iPhone comes out, we’ll see less Twitter coverage ;)

  35. Ferodynamics

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    But I’m on Twitter. That’s worth a few million right there.

    Then you got my homeboy Snoop Dog on Twitter, he follows nobody.

    Snoop tells me he’s TechCrunchin’ my munchkin!

  36. Harry

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    I agree with Chacha. Just freakin’ get OAuth support finished. I for one will not be asking my users for their Twitter passwords and store them cleartext. Twitter employees was quite involved in the OAuth standard, shouldn’t be that hard.

  37. Kirk

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    I’m sure a fair number of these Twitter accounts are also just plugged into RSS feeds via Twitterfeed (or something like it). Of course, those would be active accounts, but no one’s really behind the wheel using them.

  38. Mogilny

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    @Nathan I agree… there are so many articles on twitter on techcrunch. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Mr. Arrington has personal money invested in seesmic, the company that now owns one of twitters’ most used clients, twhirl.

  39. tweetip

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
    Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day
    =
    21,000,000 msgs per week from 200k users = 105 msgs per user per day.

    someone is off. we filter 300k non-asian msgs per day fwiw :))

  40. Michael Arrington

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    mogilny - that’s quite a creative stretch. well done.

  41. Andrew Baines

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    @Nicole Simon why would anyone want to use more than one account other than a dodgy german like you who likes to spam people with your alter(native) ego accounts.

    Lose weight you fat cow. Get off twitter and get on the treadmill. Do everyone in Germany a favor and logoff please, you give us Germans a bad name.

  42. dorothybaez

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    Twitter is not stupid nor is it used only by tech people.

  43. Fabian

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    Maybe my math is wrong and I don’t understand much about scalability, but 3million messages comes down to about 3GB of data transfer a day:

    140 Characters * 8 Bytes = 1.12KBytes

    1.12KBytes * 3.000.000 messages = 3.360.000 KBytes / 1000 = 3360MB

    3GB a day does not seem much to have scalability problems IMO. Could someone explain why they have so many issues with this?

  44. tweetip

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:26 pm

    Fabian, there are several good blog posts concerning twitter’s problems with scaling - they write each message for each follower, etc.

  45. Jochim Yadder

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:27 pm

    Loren Feldman you rock! Go yid go! Also why does twitter matter. It is very often a voyeuristic conversation at best especially when you follow people who do not reciprocate. It’s only the A-list that broadcast and treat it as an alternative RSS. it that think it matters.

    The best thing you can do on twitter to increase its value is to block arrington. calacanis and scoble. The noise ratio decreases and the intelligent conversation increases.

  46. Stever

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:33 pm

    Twitter is not only popular in Silicon Valley — it’s HUGE in the Fraser Valley too (Langley, BC)!

  47. Gunnar

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    I think that their traffic will deff increase. They are getting a lot of good press, especially from TechCrunch.

  48. Xavier

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    @Fabian :
    You only counted incoming traffic…
    Messages are not only *sent to* twitter, you know.
    Unfortunately. Most of them would better never go elsewhere…

    Many clients read them ! (I don’t think any sensible people read them for anylonger than 2/3 days, it’s just client software that ‘read’ the twitts).
    And that is traffic too.

  49. Darren

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:35 pm

    @fabian thats 3gig of db storage a day not bandwidth

    also mike this line doesn’t seem right “Many of Twitter’s most active users rarely visit the website.” RWW did an article on it they say 50% still use twitter.com as the client

  50. William r

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:36 pm

    what does it have to do with http://www.shopandsave.com

    i think shopandsave.com is will sell its secure technoligy as twitter may have an issue with its users.

  51. elan

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:38 pm

    I am new to Twitter but it seems what they bring to the table is broadcast sms. That is nice. And it definitely has its uses like when the LA Fire Dept used it for the wild fires. But I don’t follow why someone would subscribe to get 140 character txt msgs from some blogger. That seems a little (actually way) too much for me personally.

    And does Twitter have a patent on this or where is the valuation coming from? It seems like other companies could easily support broadcast sms and for the users why would they care who they subscribe through.

  52. Mogilny

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

    @Michael Maybe. Should we expect even more twitter articles now? :)

  53. Stilgherrian

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    Advertising would kill Twitter stone dead. A freemium model would be the way to go.

    At an average of 16+ tweets a day I count as a “rabid” user, it seems. I’d gladly pay a sensibly-priced fee for a solid, reliable service and/or extra features.

  54. Simon Duvall

    April 29th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    Updating an old adage. Those that CAN start a company those that CAN’T twitter. e.g Birch, Zukerberg, Andreesen do not twitter.

  55. Stilgherrian

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

    @43/Fabian: I suspect that Twitter’s scalability issues are not about bandwidth usage but database lookups. IANADBA though.

  56. adrian moss

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    no gphone

    Twitter is being used by a number of big courier companies in London to warn of traffic incidents before picked up by radio. UK Prime Ministers office is using it as a public and press info feed and gain feedback/questions for PM. One of UK’s biggest ferry companies use it to update passengers of expected arrival and departures. UK press are using it to break latest stories and point to digital news feeds for more in-depth coverage…

    Would love to know Twitter break down in European countries…

    Yes. Early adopter but already beyond geek tool and now being used as a real business information application service…

  57. UKSBD

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

    I went to have a look to see what twitter was all about, signed up, and was
    amazed with what happened next.
    They asked for my email account details and my password.
    How many Twitter users filled this in, effectively breaking the TOS of their email provider?

    More here,
    http://www.uksbd.co.uk/directo.....ers-twits/

  58. Richard Cunningham

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

    @Fabian, scalability problems are unlikely to be related to pure bandwidth or storage and the figures for these would be several times (100s of times probably) what you suggest for the reasons @Xavier points out.

    Scaling of large sites like twitter AFAIK tend to center around making database back end scale. You can run lots of webservers with a load balancer or a round-robin DNS fairly easily, but it is much harder to split the database onto multiple machines and still allow queries across all of the data.

  59. Klaus

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

    Twitter is being used more and more in the SMS Alert business.

    It saves you a lot of money if you outsource the SMS delivery costs by abusing the twitter service.

    Twitter cannot afford this much longer.

  60. Jason Bogovich

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:09 pm

    The next person who brings up, but how is it (Twitter) making money needs to go back to school and take some classes again. Twitter is the communications pipe for the up and coming Internet OS. I would sell my home and live under a bridge for the next three years if I had the chance to invest in twitter.

  61. jeffery

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    I don’t understand Twitter. Can someone please tell me how it is different than Status Update on Facebook? Isn’t just a feature? I’m sure I’m missing something since Twitter is talked about so much.

    Oh, and these usage numbers seem incredibly small to me. I was expecting many more active monthly users.

  62. Quant Muller

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    @Fabian

    The 140 characters in a tweet are 16-bit unicode, so you’re math is off by a factor of 2x. But still I think the magnitude is about right. Data rate is on order of GigaBytes per day.

    Compare this with real time systems like Nasdaq’s transactional interface where you are dealing with TeraBytes per hour and you begin to realize the minute scale of the problem.

    But I don’t think it’s a raw computational problem or geometric scaling issue. Verizon handles millions to SMS per second but not in braodcast mode. The problem arises when you have high density users engaged in rapid many-to-many broadcasting.

    I bet dollars to donuts if Obama, Scoble, & Calacanis got into a rapid fire shouting match with each other it would knock twitter out immediately.

    What is required is actually two twitter infrastructures. One for the top 20 users and one for the long tail. I know I could build the system for $1M. Bandwith for a 10Gbps network is also low cost. I would say the biggest money sink is transactional costs associated with SMS. Could be as high as $0.01 per message! Yeeee-ouch!

    Still as long as sillicon valley is subsidizing it, I’m happy to use it up.

  63. Ryan

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    Is Twitter a future Google acquisition? It’s a great social search tool….

  64. Jason Bogovich

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:15 pm

    Jeffery, Twitter is the communications highway (more like a river). Each person is given a “URL” of sorts, and then it strives to be super open so that people don’t go to competing services. The River has many streams of people talking, it’s the digital chat room for the world.

  65. Jason Bogovich

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    Quant, Twitter gets paid each time you SMS Twitter.

  66. Ryan

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

    @65, how does Twitter get paid when people SMS?

  67. Jason Bogovich

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

    Money goes from you to telephone company to twitter as far as I understand. Once a service is getting a lot of SMS’s they get paid, because they realize people are using SMS more which makes the phone companies money. I have never known this to be a 100 percent fact but I’ve heard people state it as a fact many times.

  68. Go2.0TOP

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

    If Compete is right, my personal blog is 1/3 as large as Twitter according to Adsense.

  69. Ryan

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

    @67, my research found that premium sms can generate a revenue share, but the sms messages cost the user much more than a typical sms. AFAIK, typical sms does not make any money for the bulk recipient. If I am wrong, someone please enlighten me.

  70. Jay Gould

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:30 pm

    @mogilny may not be such a stretch…

  71. Andrew

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    I love the combination of “End of Speculation” and “It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to.”

  72. Jason Bogovich

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:35 pm

    I’ve heard that you have to do either bulk or premium. I don’t have any facts though considering it’s a private company. I’d like to know for sure too.

  73. Sebastian

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:45 pm

    These are bad numbers. 200.000 users active every week? 3m tweets per day? Not more? And they STILL can’t scale? That’s pretty sad.

    I expected the numbers to be at least north of 1m active users.

  74. mobilekick.com

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    Loren Feldman is on top of this sh*t… Traffic does not always equal $$$ either. Something cos like fb and twitter need to evaluate.

  75. Ian Lamont

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

    The debate over total users kind of reminds me of the numbers that Second Life boosters used to trot out to show how much business and marketing potential there was in the virtual world: Sure, millions of residents have registered, but only a small portion ever return to the world, and fewer still are interested in “engaging” with a Coke sim.

    As for the exponential growth projections for active users, these numbers always level off, and often decline when the novelty wears off or a better service comes around. If I were backing Twitter, I’d be very concerned about Facebook or AIM rolling out Twitter-like services to their much larger user populations.

  76. Rodney Rumford

    April 29th, 2008 at 3:58 pm

    I blogged about this with charts from all 3 services before mike did this morning. Nice post Mike.

    The bottom line is twitter is growing but as mike said no one can get an accurate handle on the metrics due to the mobile aspects. Let’s just accept the fact that there is huge growth that is migrating outside of tech circles.

    The bottom line is twitter is building value with all the 3rd party API based services.

    http://facereviews.com/2008/04.....ady-to-tip

    Rodney Rumford

  77. Are you Twittering?

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    Funny, how I’ve been hearing about Twitter for over a year, and finally signed-up for an account. Since then, everyone in our company created accounts too.

  78. Marc Boucher

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    I don’t know if it’s coincidence, as I was not aware of this article, but I wrote an article earlier today titled “How Many Users does Twitter Really Have?”. The numbers I mentioned are partly based on speculation, partly based on third party services and my own companies crawling of Twitter. To me that 1+ million number seems low but it could very well be accurate. Twitdir has recorded over 1+ million accounts.

    When I signed up for Twitter a year ago I didn’t get it. I’ve since learned that it can be a powerful business tool not to mention just fun to use.

  79. Uway

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    Only Nerds and Geeks Get Twitter 

  80. Neville Hobson

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    According to the TwitDir directory, there are 1,014,740 twitterers.

    See the number just above the search box on the site.
    http://www.twitdir.com/

  81. baah-baah-the-black-sheep

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    @Ferrodynamics
    If Compete is right, your personal blog is 1/16 size of twitter by visitors.
    ferodynamics.com - 56,176
    twitter.com - 894,476
    http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv

  82. Jonathan

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    Would you pay £12/$24 a year for Twitter? Vote here

  83. anon8mizer

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:39 pm

    I am not sure ‘total messages posted’ is a good metric either.

    My friend just sent out a twitter that said, “my baby just pooped”

  84. Klaus

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:58 pm

    @Arrington

    >What’s most interesting is the rabid Twitter usage by active users - they send an average of 15 Twitter message per day.

    No, some Dave Winers are sending 20 messages a day to their 8,648 * 20% active Followers generating ~35,000 messages each

    @Quant Muller

    >I would say the biggest money sink is transactional costs associated with SMS. Could be as high as $0.01 per message! Yeeee-ouch!

    No, could be as high as $0.10 per message! Yeeee-ouch!

  85. anon

    April 29th, 2008 at 4:59 pm

    I am curious about the msg count. Do they count every outbound message? Do they count an outbound message even if its sent to my home page and I never look at it?

    I ask because I notices several people who follow my accounts (I personally have five) that follow thousands, in some cases tens of thousands, of other people. Are they counting every update these lurkers receive even if they never look at them and don’t received them using IM or SMS? If so, their msg count would be very misleading.

    @Fabian, scaling will be directly impacted by how many users consume their posts using point to point clients like SMS and Instant Messaging (IM). In these cases, a user with one thousand followers using SMS will result in one thousand outbound logical SMS messages, most of the SMS services provide batching of SMS posts.

    SMS aggregators will be significantly slower than the inbound update queue, so Twiiter will need to have at least one tier of outbound queues. The architecture will be the similar for their Twitter to Jabber/IM bridge for sending and receiving IM messages.

  86. David Henderson

    April 29th, 2008 at 5:01 pm

    All the fuss over twitter and that’s it… 1M users.

    That’s a Facebook or Myspace rounding error. Please email me when they hit 50M.

    Once again it’s the blogsters making something seem so much bigger that it actually is. Normal people do not tweet and could care less and…. never will.

    Social Networking is a generational shift (Gen Y) in media behavior similar in magnitude to the World Wide Web 14 years ago. Twitter is a bunch of early tech adopters.

  87. Robert Scoble

    April 29th, 2008 at 5:06 pm

    I just ran a panel at the Paid Conference EconSM conference. Keep in mind that this was a social media conference. Only about 5% of the audience said they were on Twitter.

  88. hawaii

    April 29th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    I still think that there growth will really grow this year as Twitter becomes more mainstream.

  89. allan

    April 29th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

    Twain said there were three kinds of lies. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

  90. Ryan