Twitter Ready To Tip?
Published by Rodney Rumford April 29th, 2008 in social networks, twitter.
Twitter is continuing to experience rapid growth in the last quarter. According to web analytics company hitwise twitter Internet visits are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.
The challenge with metrics services like hitwise, alexa and compete providing accurate growth measurement is that twitter has many access points and it hard to measure due to it’s mobile components and third party applications that are built on the twitter API.
The glaring conclusion and undeniable truth is that Twitter is growing very rapidly in the past few months and might be close to hitting a tipping point. When I see journalists, leading bloggers, teens, 20 somethings and executives using twitter I know there is something compelling to the service that is cross generational/demographic and that value is there.
The service is growing largely due to its growing loyal user base recruiting more members into the service. I have never seen an advertisement for Twitter (and we have looked). You will see more people using their twitter address in their email signature files. You will also notice more twitter status updates on websites and blogs.
It is also noteworthy that there are some forward thinking businesses (large corporations) using twitter for different use cases effectively. Twitter is big in Japan due to their cultural embrace of mobile technology. This could be a foreshadowing of things to come in North America.
Twitter US Market Share According to Hitwise
Twitter Stats According to Alexa
Twitter Growth According to Compete
UPDATE: TechCrunch has some additional insights to these numbers:
Technorati Tags: twitter, twitter growth
IBM is big on Twitter, so much so that they also have their own internal version and a plugin for Lotus Notes that allows you to update either or both at the same time.