It turns out that people are following more than just their friends online. Look at the comScore chart above comparing unique visitors in the U.S. to FriendFeed versus Twine. Yeah, I was shocked to see that Twine has more than three times as many unique monthly visitors as FriendFeed (714,000 vs. 188,000). On a worldwide basis, comScore shows FriendFeed still slightly ahead of Twine. ComScore doesn’t always do a great job with small sites, so I checked Compete, which shows Twine with 2.25 million monthly visitors in April versus 998,000 for FriendFeed (see embed below). Different numbers, same story.
While FriendFeed is organized around following feeds of your friends’ activities across the Web, Twine is organized around interest feeds. Essentially, Twine members create topic pages that others can follow. It requires more work than FriendFeed. You have to add items such as links,articles, videos, and notes. But once you do, Twine organizes them for you using an underlying semantic index and tagging technology combined with social inputs from the community. So in a sense it competes more with Mahalo or Squidoo in that it creates authoritative pages around topics, except that these pages are really constantly updated topic or interest feeds that anyone can add to. You can read more about the original concept here, which relaunched publicly in October, 2008. All the growth is from October.
I pinged Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, to ask what’s up. He says that both the Compete and comScore numbers are off, but the trend is right. The initial growth came simply from letting people in who had been on the waiting list. But even he is surprised by the growth rate. So far five million items have been bookmarked in Twine. There are now 200,000 registered users who have created Twines (its name for interest feeds) across 30,000 different interest groups. The rest of the traffic comes from people visiting those topic pages.
And it is not all SEO traffic. Spivack provides the following breakdown of traffic by source: 59 percent comes from people coming directly to Twine, 20 percent comes from search engines, and most of the rest comes from people who receive email notifications and daily digests tracking the interest feeds they’ve signed up for. About 2 percent of traffic comes from twitter, but that portion is “rising fast.”
Following interesting people is just a proxy for following your interests, and Twine lets you connect with like-minded people as well. It is the combination that is killer.
I remember hearing about Twine when it first came out and I thought it was a great concept. I’m glad to see that they’re taking off and doing really well.
right direction for tweets. let me remind u TC feature smsgupshup india, and new startup by myspace founder in same direction.
forums or groups on interests were always needed, now real time search adds value to them. fb should make real time search of public comments/posts in fb groups and pages.
Type “Wolfram Alpha” into Google. Look at the top 3 links. One of them is a twine post.
It’s really hard to draw meaningful conclusions from monthly uniques.
Too good points, Gabe. Twine’s SEO efforts probably help. And yes, the MUVs tell only a slice of the pie, esp. for smaller sites.
Gabe — Wolfram is a bad example. Nova broke the Wolfram news in the first place, with a guest post right here on TC. The two have been very closely associated ever since.
http://www.tech...oing-to-be-big/
Re: monthly uniques, Twine has a very strong and active core of maven-like read/write users, and a much larger number of people who use the site as a resource to discover and track information around their interests. The engagement for each group is going to look quite different. But these behaviors are symbiotic and in tandem are fueling the cited growth.
In this sense, the model is a lot more like Wikipedia than Friendfeed in terms of how content is created and consumed.
Josh, that’s what makes Wolfram a good example for my point.
My point is that I suspect most of Twine’s monthly uniques are not active users, but one-time visitors. I could be wrong, but you didn’t say anything to dispute this suggestion.
BTW, I have nothing against Twine, but am often irked by conclusions based on monthly uniques.
Ahh, I get it — apologies — your point was that Wolfram does indeed drive a lot of traffic because it is a hot topic, etc. Good point. You’re totally right — getting good content into Twine is a good way to get a lot of people to lay eyeballs on the service — and tempt them to take it for a spin, hopefully.
On that note, the SXSW twine is another example of a topical interest that did really well. And a few of the top overall twines right now are on Swine Flue and the Financial Meltdown.
Re: #’s, Compete and Comscore are public services and so good for discussion purposes (arguing internal versus external numbers = bad idea, hehe). You’ll see from both of those that the engagement stats for Twine are very decent — not bad, and not amazing (compared to Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Squidoo, etc.).
Again, what that represents is a mix of a highly-engaged core user base, and the casual window shoppers/interest trackers. Again, that dynamic is central to the Twine experience and growth.
What I can tell you from my little corner of the world is that the team and the board are very happy with the conversion rates from traffic into members. And that Twine is hitting its monthly goals easily. That doesn’t disprove your point that uniques can be misleading, of course. Uniques absolutely can be misleading. But everyone is pretty happy so far — the site is darn healthy across all metrics, and uniques are a great way of demonstrating that Twine is getting more and more engrained in how people “find, share and follow” as we have been saying.
Twine is public (no login) for read access, so anyone can view public content. But literally half of all content in Twine is private, which is another interesting fact — again, signifying two different types of activities/use cases (and levels of engagement).
I’ll say one more thing and then shut up, hehe.
When Twine started out, bookmarking was the primary activity. But now, there is a large enough user base generating quality public content that in fact search is currently the predominant metaphor.
I think that Erick is actually going to write more about this at some point, but the forthcoming Twine 2.0 takes this transition into consideration — it’s optimized for how people are actually using the site these days (versus when Twine was just getting going). Twine is taking what is working, and optimizing to make it even better.
As much as I do contribute to Twine, and have been contributing since the beta, I’m shocked that it’s attracting more users than Friendfeed. Maybe our assumptions/wishes regarding the adoption of social engagement/interaction services is flawed, and people are more likely to gravitate to information-centric services like Twine.
I have to say, Twine has lagged on the user-friendliness IMO, while FF has taken leaps and bounds.
huh?
I’ll take a look at it
Are there comment threads on Twine? Is there a realtime feed? If not, I hardly understand the competitive comparison.
I use both regularly. I read twine’s links from my email and friendfeed activity in real time. Both are complementary. Both are cool ;-)
I never would have thought to compare them. I know Twine is social and what not, but it seems more like a search engine to me, rather than like FriendFeed.
Sign up is really slow right now
This is good to see. I like Twine, although I kind of use it in bursts rather than all the time. I’ll have to get back into it now that there is obviously significantly more content.
Is it similar though ? I haven´t checked it out but I thought it was more about bookmarking.
Right. Is this just more of Arrington’s irrational dislike of FriendFeed?
Unique visitors doesn’t mean returning visitors. It could be lookie-loos.
Yes, I’m certainly finding it difficult to know where to place attention now. With real-time I like the idea of mashing recommendations from people along with recommendations from engines that find threads/topcis you’re interested in.
I find the amount of time spent customizing twine is not worth what you ultimately get from the service. The UI is confusing and the color palette almost makes me dizzy. Recommendations are usually slow to come up and off.
And the service is dog slow in comparison with FF. It took them 18 hours to import my (a few hundred) bookmarks.
I think the service is highly overhyped and usually does not deliver.
I noticed this the other day, and I think a ton of it has to do with their SEO.
It would be great to see some user numbers and how many active accounts, etc.
After looking at Twine a few times, I still can’t figure out what it does, and why.
I think their SEO is too effective perhaps.
Everything you click seems to bring back:
“Umm. Looks like Twine has to tie up a few loose ends.”
Lol
The have not learned the lesson is that if you are unprepared to handle the scale which comes from the TC traffic it is better not to solicit a PR event like that.
I rate the bookmarklet but still not using Twine that regularly. Just checked the site again and it appears to be really slow..
Yes, it’s a little like asking — “which do you like better: peanut butter or jelly?”… ; >
It does provoke a rethinking of the relative meaning & value of comparing uniques. And the emerging difference between why go, when to go and who goes to social utilities vs social communities.
I hadn’t even heard about it. Checking it out now. It looks interesting. Is it easy to connect with people there?
amazed by how much traffic friendfeed DOESNT have. its such a great service.
The comparison is an attempt to find the next social web darling and both sites are actually the ones I visit most in the browser, definitely surprised that Twine is bigger, not better, than ff
Nobody’s answered me yet. Does Twine have any of the social functionality of FF?
Mark, you can comment and share. I’d say it’s more like Google Reader than Friend Feed. The main difference with GR is that it is interest based, kind of like Feedly I suppose. The big thing is that it uses symantic logic to suggest items, groups etc. There is some social functionality in that you can connect with people with similar interests. I’m no expert by any means, but that is how I see it.
Is there a way to import your bookmarks into Twine? If this service makes me tag my bookmarks more than once, it’s a giant fail.
You can import your bookmarks into Twine with one click.
I signed up for twine during the beta but never could get into it
@Steve, I’m not 100% sure. I haven’t created a Twine for a long time, but I think you could import your bookmarks at that point. It might just do an RSS OPML file though. Can’t remember.
Not surprised at all. FriendFeed is and always will be too much for most users. i find it annoying because of the lack of control you have on what is aggregated from the people your are following and how you are supposed to just filter stuff out as a way to control the madness. something i find inherently crazy..
i use FriendFoo with FriendFeed and even then it is not enough to truly say you are in control
OK, went and tried. No, you cannot import bookmarks or OPML. You create the twine, add some tags and then it will go out and find stuff related to those tags. As you manually add items to it, it will revise and suggest other items. You can add web pages, docs, notes, images, videos and your twines can be public or private.
isn’t “bigger than friendfeed” similar to “worlds tallest midget”?
I’m confused, why does one’s stats say anything about the other? These services really have nothing in common other they piggy back functionality on other much larger much more interesting services.
Seems to me like the comparison should be made between Twine and Google Reader. With GReader you can also share, comment and friend people. What Twine doesn’t have that Friendfeed has is conversation. You’d think with 3 times the visitors it’d be more lively
Twine imported my delicious bookmarks and saved them as my "items"
This comparison is definitely a reach. Twine and FriendFeed are dissimilar services. Twine is more like Social Median where you set topics of interest and the service aggregates a grouping of stories related to the topic. I frequently share links discovered by Twine on FriendFeed, Facebook and old fashioned E-mail to Friends and colleagues. I also see similarities with Google Reader but, certainly not FriendFeed.
You can use this link to import bookmarks: http://www.twine.com/import
Beside that, I prefer the user experience of FF
Just tried it and think TWINE is great !! This could be the next big thing on the web
I tried Twine and Friendfeed at the same time and I enjoyed friendfeed much better. I just can’t get into Twine. It seems confusing and less interactive. Also remember twine just left their private beta and went public in the last month.
Not as easy to set up as friendfeed IMO.
guffaw!
Played around with it and I’m not impressed..
Always thought a better measurement would be if a person was still participating after several months, a lot of people join social networks but after a short time stop participating.
Cheesy Arrington link bait headline. FF rules… Oh, and what is twine again??
Susan, that’s EXACTLY what it is.
I was on it the other day for the first time in a year, and I was so impressed that I had to make a comment on twitter about it. It’s still far from perfect, but they’ve fixed a lot of serious problems which made it unusable, in my opinion. One thing I noticed immediately is the semantic engine really seems to shine now.
BTW: I would never compare it to friendfeed. It’s only a semantic social bookmarking service. Nothing more.
I’m more esceptic on these numbers, they are non significant if we are going to compare the services. Twine doesn’t offer an API forcing you to visit the site, Friendfeed on the other hand has an API and lots of widgets.
I haven’t used Twine in over six months. I guess it’s time to to give Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) another look.
I don’t see how they can be compared.
Agree with Adriana