Maybe it is all the TV news mentions, but Twitter is seeing the growth in U.S visitors to its site accelerating. In February, 4 million people in the U.S. visited the site, up from 2.6 million the month before, according to the latest data from comScore. That represents a 55 percent month-over-month growth rate, compared to 33 percent growth in each of the two months prior. (ComScore has yet to release February figures for worldwide visitors, but for January that number is 6 million).
These numbers are only for visitors to Twitter.com, and they do not capture usage on desktop or mobile clients. And the apps just keep on coming. For instance, Twitdom now counts 529 Twitter apps. But the site visitor numbers are indicative of the steep growth ramp Twitter is enjoying right now. It is still early days. Can its growth keep accelerating or is it unsustainable?
Not surprising, only a matter of time before companies saw the potential.
We at SpiderOak Inc created a twitter account some time ago ( http://twitter....m/Spideroak_Inc ) to harness the power of twitter search and to be able to communicate more ‘relaxed’ to our most dedicated customers.
So far not a huge source of traffic but it seems to hold relatively high quality and it’s ‘free’ so to speak so why would anyone want to stay out?
Great way to push special offers, communicate and strengthen your overall customer satisfaction.
Was the https://spideroak.com background on your twitter page a marketing ploy to showcase how much your company cares about data security?
Nice one!
twitter exploding in Australia as well.
Last nights annual aimia awards was twitter central
http://search.t.../search?q=aimia
How shocking that twitter is exploding in a country where everyone consumes the exact same way.
every where , i was on Africa last week …they know it
ohh..In India too, twitter craze is increasing slowly by slowly.
My Twitter:http://twitter.com/noteeboyz15
http://www.smartbloggerz.com
Perhaps TechCrunch has something to do with it…
When searching ‘Twitter’ on TC, guess how many results are found?
Results: 1-10 of 50,369,085
Perhaps if TechCrunch wasn’t a bunch of twats sitting on shares of Twitter you’d hear something other than never ending praise of a business that can never monetize.
Shut up, man
yea twitter is over rated. and i agree techcrunch talks about them every chance they get its getting lame TC talk about something for a change
hey! my grandma never said the t-word!
Personally, despite really really trying, I don’t ‘get’ twitter yet.
I disagree it can’t be monetized – where there’s users, there’s money.
Twitter is obviously important to many people, including TechCrunch eds, so why wouldn’t they cover it?
Hope twitter grows this way all day. Would be great for all the cool twitter apps that are profiled at twi5.com
Blatant.
Looks like you’re just spamming. Sending the same advertising-style-message to everyone writing about “backup” (i guess?) just isnt cool.
These numbers are only for visitors to Twitter.com, and they do not capture usage on desktop or mobile clients. And the apps just keep on coming.
I’m seeing partnerships with Twitter on ESPN shows so their biz dev machine must be rolling. Have never questioned Twitter’s ability to attract users and maintain high growth. Only question is how they plan to monetize. Tested out Twitter Search and it’s ok. Not sure I’d use it everyday like I do Google but it’s a start.
PTI’s use of Twitter is excellent! Perfect content to tie into the show.
I have no doubts that twitter, with all the information they can harvest from users can monetize their search (more prominent placing, better search results etc needed) at a very nice CPM for targeted ads.
A model that would be especially smart would be if they can tie the Click-cost to the amount of followers a user has + subject of ad.
Imagine being able to charge $50/click when Michael Arrington clicks on something, due to the likeliness of word of mouth, nr of followers and coverage on Techcrunch, while paying $0.40/click for ‘Uneducated 17-year old Rural Joe’ with 5 friends.
Now there is the future of Advertising right there!
Recall the rise and fall of Friendster?
APIs help extend Twitter as a platform. Friendster never had these extra network effects early on.
Not to mention, Friendster never had this level of press!
agreed its a friendster a rise and fall definately. its only a matter of time before cellphone company have a future like this so that you can message selected friends via your cellphone without having to go through a twitter like site. twitter is over-rated def.
We are pleased to announce from our HQ in San Jose, California, that the final votes for our monthly award, the “Smelly and Sticky Spammer,” are in and counted. The final tally was conducted during our mid-afternoon pretzels-and-beers meeting, under the supervision of our Founder & CEO, Donoth Laughard. The results are:
– First nominee: “Smart Babes Are Sexy,” authored by an “Anjali Sen,” allegedly from Delhi, India.
– Second nominee: the “Locator” guy, who requested to remain anonymous or, in his own words, “unlocated”
Congratulations for both unwilling participants!
You have won our coveted award, the “Smelly and Sticky Spammer” from sunny California!
And amazingly they haven’t posted yet
AwardLocator.com – Congratulate yourself
smelly like roses and sticky like glue. appreciate you taking the time out of your busy work day to honor the honorable. i always knew i had an avid following. heres some more of my meat and potatoes for those who have not ate dinner.
http://www.back...nts?q=mylocator
WinnerLocator.com – take all
i thanks you from the bottom of my heart
retards
Dude – it was funny at first – but now, I don’t know what’s worse, the spammers, or the spam haters!
I suspect that Twitter is on a massive media campaign now. I believe they bought product placements on The Daily Show, on Colbert, and that they have been heavily networking with media and tech bloggers.
This sudden rise in traffic isn’t a coincidence, nor is it because Twitter is so great.
I mean, it is because Twitter is great that people love and use it (including me – Trailbehind). But the recent surge is a calculated effort I presume.
Seriously, it is getting a little too obvious with the paid placement marketing push, when you see 15 asinine twitter stories making front page of even digg everyday.
And the constant mentions in TechCrunch aren’t paid advertisement? Please… Either that or Arrington is sitting on some backroom stock offer, the twit.
http://www.quan...com/twitter.com
HENDRICKSON!!!
What the Hell is going on Over @ 1938Media..???
Get Fred on the Line..
Heard The Gilmore Gang is Riding Again!
AND DON”T FORGET THAT POST !!!!!!!!
Now that is some sweet stuff right there. Twitter is one of the best networks I’ve been on since the birth of MySpace!
Twitter is growing? How is this a story?
Must be a slow day on the tubes…
Yeah, doesn’t surprise me, but still interesting. I’ve seen tons of new companies and unlikely individuals to sign up for the service lately.
I want to show you my Tweets! lol
Love you Twitter!
I keep waiting for it to break, but they seem to have weathered the recent growth quite well.
A lot of the early adopters…not weathering so well.
There’s a huge boom in the hurt feelings market right now, and I’m bullish on it continuing as more and more folks realize they’re not as cool as they thought they were when Twitter wasn’t.
@davejohnston
Oh, and…
“This place is dead anyway.”
You know how I know you’re gay?
Because you use twitter!
Seriously, it seems like Dave is waiting for the Early Adopter medal of Congress. The twat.
yeah so no more post about it not being mainstream
Yeah I’d say it’s gone mainstream at this point. Same for Facebook.
Facebook is in a different league to Twitter just now!
The one thing i do like about twitter is that when it sells for $100 mill + it will revert VC money back to the web.
Check out the monologue that Ellen (the Ellen Show) did a couple of days ago http://tinyurl....qoyn…very funny.
She managed to get over 120,000 followers. All this press has got to be making Evan happy. I have to admit while i signed up a long time ago, I found myself not using it and not seeing the value or how they would make money at it. But the light bulbs are on now.
http://twitter.com/techdom
404??
Everyone is talking about Twitter, from celebrities to scientists and politicians. No wonder it’s growing.
Twitter is doing a great job marketing themselves. Plus many companies are marketing twitter for them by using twitter to market themselves. btw, I posted a similar story yesterday on http://huuep.com.
We also think that people in the public eye are now mentioning Twitter. We also noted that Ellen Degeneres is now on Twitter, and have heard it mentioned in our local news as part of a story.
Twitter is all grown up. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/tvwuAaCrdp_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Twitter is all grown up. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/K37MGy3xaH”}}}
Hahah, a grown up is someone who makes money.
^this
Kobe is way better than lebron
TC is on the the twitter payroll, all you get is twitter this twitter that.
twitter is pure marketing momentum, you push it out there enough times and it’s like, OK lets see what the fuss is all about, when you sign-up it’s all useless info from prats sending one-liners.
It’s like facebooks “what are you doing now”, I could’nt give a toss if someone thinks there funny, I dont check back with half the dicks that follow me because it’s like being in a cafe making small talk with your co-workers; pure bollocks.
People talk about monetising this shit, what is there to monetise. Once diffusion sets in as we have seen with the facebook version of twitter there will be one main place to facebitter without having to piss about with your favorites browser button.
twitter without semantics is just a noise.
i tend to agree with neno regarding the productivity value of twittle. i cant find anything useful about twittle. i would like to see a productivity meter as how beneficial twittle is to society. how many jobs it produces, how many business people go there and exhange products or services. my guess is that if you want to be productive or truly learn something besides what ellen and shaq are doing its best to stay away from twittle.
agreed TC is on twitters payroll
Great post, Neno! Had me laughing late-night
Of course Twitter pays TC to promote them. As does Facebook. Bloggers are no different that newspapers or any other business media outlet, “you want us to mention you, then cough up money.”
I am a business owner and run various PR activities and my agency confirms that all this crap is paid for. The web is not this word-of-mouth thing we think it is.
How did everyone in the US buy into the spin of the Iraq war…MEDIA BULLSHIT. People are sheep, Facebook is proof of that. It’s no different, except this time lives are not at stake, just information.
As long as it’s free and there is no advertising, it can probably keep growing..once it figures out a business model, growth will slow substantially (and probably go negative)
It’s official. Facebook Home page now looks like Twitter3.0.
I guess the Indian programmers I have working fro me have some FB contacts or FB is stealing my ideas. They set up is 95% what I had in mind about 6 months ago or longer.
None the less it is good to see the convergence. But the funny things is Twitter more than likely copied news feed from FB. So who is really following who now.
Either way. FB will be toast in 3 years. Twitter more tan likely will be sold by then also.
Is Google serious enough to put a huge dent in FB and Twitter Armour? If they do not they could be setting themselves up big time.
The cool things is fragmentation and innovation that will cause the demise of Google will cause the same for FB. But who will be first?
Well google is rolling out their master plan bit by bit. However it may be too broad to gain meaningful traction. The artificial barriers to entry are getting lower and lower.
In fact they no longer exist. Gentlemen the web is now official wide open. It is every man for himself
. There is Gold in them there hills 
MUAAAAAHHAHHHHAAAH
You copied twitter, facebook copied you or facebook copied twitter, either way diffusion is the judge and jury on this one my learned friend.
No , no no. We all copied from the first website ever made
I mean a tab, a thumbnail, a snap shot, a module, an icon, a button , wow.
There is only so much you can do on a website until you begin to move to true 3D. However Twitter had a particular style not ezactly like FB New Feed.
Now FB news feed looks almost exactly like Twitter’s home page.
Thus that is true copycat. As it is one thing to innovate and come with something that looks and feels distinct. It is another to just follow another’s example almost to a “T”.
None the less the most important group that matters is the end user. As long as you have them in mind you are almost certain to be a hit. The latter is what will make a site or break a site.
Take it from a true Luddite.
time for that AA meeting.
Google all the way down with twitter and FB is a fad
@Anti Matter,
Shut up, you retard spammer.
WOW an idiot who does not know what spamming is. I bet you this fool is from Jamaica.
Where are the URLs promoting a site jackass? In this case it would fall under spam in blogs.
Now let us see:
http://en.wikip...i/Spam_in_blogs
GAFYSB
Brevity {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/pmb63vZvSQ_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Brevity ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/RzSo4YmQ7t”}}}
Quite right. It’s a bit like writing headlines instead of stories.
It’s nice to see that FaceCrunch has now transformed itself into TwitCrunch. I expect no less that 25 stories everyday about Twitter.
i am proud that i don’t have a twitter profile. just as i am proud that i don’t have a myspace or facebook account either. these things are taking over people’s lives. i’ve had em. i know.
People who are twits have such deep and rich social life. They have tens of thousands of friends and followers. Hell, Kevin Rose might start a religion he has so many followers.
Has anyone seriously stopped to think about how pointless it actually is to have followers? What does it gain you? Who cares about these alleged social networks. They people following a twit are even less connected to them in any meaningful way than FaceBook ‘friends’. At least in FB some of the people in your ‘friends’ list are actually friends and not some random acquaintances you barely talk to.
Twitter is a soapbox and when it actually manages to cover the money it raised I’ll be impressed. Of course there’s always a chump out there (er…billions for YouTube for example) and that seems to be the policy. Have fanboi retards like Arrington push your shit for free or some meager stock gift, and maybe you’ll really be able to land a chump.
Good luck with that.
It depends on the situation. Each uses Twitter differently. There must be some utility or no one wouldn’t be using it.
I for example have a FB account but don’t use it for friendship building or recording. To me, it’s just another set of forums really.
People like Al Gore and other celebs can connect with their followers, and ignore those that try to make contact with them, but at least people are connecting and communicating in way that was previously not possible.
On Facebook the connections have to be mutual, on Twitter they do not, so there are different nuances and ethics at work.
I’ll explain the ‘utility’. We just love our bits and bytes…data being fed straight into our brains. Society loves any and all kinds of nonesense these days from celebrity bullshit to jumping on bandwagons so they can group-think and not feel alone. We’ve got MAJOR problems and one of them happens to be called ‘adopting at ever-quickening rates every new piece of technology that comes out’. Is that blasphemy on a tech site? Sue me, I like to be informed without buying in.
Society is going to hell in a handbasket faster than we can tweet about it. Save yourself.
Doesn’t that depend on how you use the site? I don’t add strangers to my Facebook or Twitter accounts, so I only hear about people I’m interested in anyway.
You see the February numbers? Watch March.
Wow, i wonder why twitter is so popular? Anyway, I just signed up an account for myself.
That growth rate is pretty unbelievable. They’re doing a pretty damn good job keeping the service stable. It used to go down so often 1 year ago, when they had like 1% the amount of traffic they do now.
It really is hitting mainstream big time. I keep hearing so many people talk about it that don’t have an account but they’re talking about it because other people are talking about it and they want to know more about it. I’ve never seen any internet brand take off like this before. My personal experience may be different but not even Myspace or Facebook had this kind of mainstream penetration and buzz that I ever remember.
@daniel larson
Nice linkbait dude.
The reason Identi.ca did not grow like Twitter was scalability.
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
If you need to scale your service to Twitter growth get a hold of me. I will be able to help you now.
I have massive computing power, 50+TB storage capacity and lots of bandwidth to help our new customers. XMPP scaling problems?
Get a hold of me. Your service will NEVER make it with even the slightest bottleneck. I have throughput you need.
I’m not just saying I do or marketing. I really do have it. Physically. Above that I have top tier California bandwidth.
California backbone bandwidth is the most desirable in the world. Twitter has California bandwidth.
Yeah, everyone knows those Euro-megabits cant hold a candle to good old Cali throughput?
I’ve been to Europe 3 times in the past 4 years and each time the networks there were vastly inferior to America’s.
I went to London, UK, Paris, France, Zurich Switzerland, and Hamburg Germany.
Even though I hate socialism, this isn’t based on that. These places really do have bad internet access which discourages people from using those services.
Daniel,
There are 2 usage hotspots you have to be concerned about when running social software.
NY State, California.
Other ISPs around the world have hotspot usage rates vastly, and exponentially lower than those 2 areas. You also have to worry about net neutrality.
So you want at least a CDN source area in one of those 2 places. Akamai could take care of that for you, but Akamai is expensive and there is a better, newer way. It’s cloud computing.
So you have your Linux image that was going to run Twitter_competitor_ica.ca
You want to cluster 3 of those images. The new service I am opening will let you winSCP, FTP or even HTTP upload your
tar cfz my_funky_ubutnu_desktop.tar.gz
after you have suped it up with some crazy config and software,
Then pay a low fee, about $40, and run that Ubuntu image, with new /proc and /dev on our servers which are much more powerful and have way more CALIFORNIA bandwidth than your little Dell laptop running Ubuntu.
Do you get it? Do you get it?
So33t CDN Cloud is going to rain on parades!
$40 was per small single boot OS HDD image instance ONLY
* no windows, taxes in CA apply
** non automated help out of the support forum will cost extra
$40 PER MONTH
How? : our proprietary technology will reach into your uncompressed image and change resolv, hosts, ect before attempting to boot it.
If it’s too messed up, you will have to manually fix it according to guidelines and try again. Your $40 starts on first upload regardless of whether you followed the image tarring guidelines or not.
“Yeah, everyone knows those Euro-megabits cant hold a candle to good old Cali throughput?”
I want to address the original point you made too as well as telling people about our new scalability, and cloud Ubuntu/RHEL/NOVL image upload and /boot services.
ok so “Yeah, everyone knows those Euro-megabits cant hold a candle to good old Cali throughput?”
The more way points you hit on the way to your network destination. The more routers you go through on tracert, the worse your situation. The biggest audience for Twitter and any other English language social web services in the world is California.
So if you hit a way point that is slow or enforces any type of network throttling, you are totally screwed.
1MBPS from Europe is not the equivalent of 1MBPS in California on Level 3.
The goal of Soeet CDN is to give you direct access to the biggest online market in California with your own Linux images that you can install and customize on your little Dell laptop before running on a machine with god like resources and network power.
I hope this helps.
Unsustainable.
It is not unsustainable. We have the cheapest hardware and bandwidth on earth available to the largest online audience.
@Daniel
https://spidero...m/thesupercloud
“Then you should never compare SpiderOak to its competitors.”
Ok, ok, I will never compare SpiderOak to it’s competitors because that would be unfair.
I didn’t mention it earlier, our system will let you upload, pay for and run unlimited tar cfz / linux disk images hypervised with no wait time or human interaction. It will all be automated at a low, low cost.
Its an “OSMeS” Frenzy time.. Go OSMeS… Twitter was a great breakthrough in OSMeS industry..
could just be the spam that people have been getting when people you have never heard of invite you to twitter
The internet tends to follow exponential curves…
Facebook is trying to compete with its new layout.
I was just checking yesterday, I have 3 times more friends on Facebook than on Twitter. But actual numbers of daily updates are 3 x lower than Twitter.
Basically Twitter users are 9 x more active than FB users. (i hope my math is correct
Im sure that this is pretty much general pattern all over the world.
Twitter is much more real time than FB and this is main reason why people like it.
I guess the key point is to have open API which gives opportunity for large numbers of mobile apps. Just for iphone there are dozens of applications. How many application FB have on iphone? One
Twitters growth is amazing. I hope it can handle it
Twitter is really great when it comes to online social networking. More and more people are now being hooked to it!
There is a lot of hate for Twitter here but the stats don’t lie, whether they can monetize or not it’s still a popular service at the moment and I get a lot of good information from the 300+ people I follow
Nice post! Check out my site too at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
Yeah its nuts how crazy it has been growing, It has been mentioned so much on tv I think is one of the main reasons. I am surprised they have been able to scale twitter so far without it totally collapsing.
I enjoyed this piece greatly,very informative.
I feel the key to Twitter power is the speed and the 140 character limit as it fits perfectly with our high speed lives in 2009.
Paul
I think Twitter is all Vanity and Loneliness. It’s sad.
You and everyone else who thinks it’s about vanity and narcissism are missing the point. Huge communities of users have sprung up around their hobbies and passions. This allows users to talk shop/discuss future projects/share links, etc. quickly and easily without the need to create a group or set up a walled garden like a Ning group. Twitter’s power is in WHO YOU FOLLOW.
Chris is right on but there are already these wacky things called message boards if you want in depth discussion and Q&A. What does it tell you about the usefulness of it when it becomes overwhelmingly useless to follow a lot of people (see: Calacanis and Loic bailing).
Thanks for mentioning us in the article.
I have about another 50 apps submitted since you wrote this article. I’m slowing clearing them.
The rate at which submissions are coming in, I guess we will be over 1000 applications well before the end of the year.
If you search “twitter” on Google Trends, the recent upswing is so sharp that the graph has trouble drawing it….
http://www.goog...rends?q=twitter
I’m interested in twitter daily activity – how many tweets per day are posted? Does anybody know where I could find that information?
it’s the revolution of twitter! follow, unfollow, interesting, “i don’t care” thats all …. it’s so great! and the network has no limits.
Anyone notice how all the media mentions seem to be coming specifically from the list of suggested users … it’s the quid pro quo.
JusTwitter -> The Twitter Applications Directory
http://justwitter.com
http://solotwitter.com