As an avid Twitterer, I’ve noticed that there was a surge in trafifc on the micro-blogging platform and the number of users have increased significantly as compared to a few months ago when the US Presidential election was going on. According to Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, there are around 4-5 million active users currently tweeting about their social life and sharing interesting links with their friends. Some celebrities such as Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rose and Britney Spears use it to convey messages to their fans.
From the graph by Google Trends, it shows that more search queries about Twitter were being made on Google and it is heading up north steeply starting from the last quarter of 2008 as compared with its fellow Web 2.0 pioneers which includes Digg, Flickr and Delicious. Flickr, which was represented by the orange line, is moving at a steady pace whereas for social voting system Digg and social bookmarking website Delicious, it seems to be dying. I believe that Twitter will continue to “kill” its rivals (those which I’ve mentioned above) but overtaking the world’s most popular social networking website Facebook seems impossible as the Palo Alto, California-based company still continues to grow healthily.
Besides grabbing information from Google Trends, I’ve made some research on Alexa too even though it’s widely known as an inaccurate tool by many bloggers. For Twitter, it has done pretty well with an upward trend and currently, it’s ranked #314 and a yesterday traffic rank of 213. As for both Digg and Delicious, they tend to be heading south rapidly just like the current NASDAQ Stock Market.
Created in 2006, Twitter has emerged from just a SMS service to a world-renowned social platform that even US President Barack Obama make use of it to win the election. Also, an average of 2,000,000 tweets are posted daily with about 66,000 at its peak hour according to a real-time statistics service by TweetRush.
Link of Google Trends Graph: http://tinyurl.com/d9s93k
Original Idea from Lior Levin: http://twitter.com/liors
It doesn’t surprise me as facebook and twitter make it easier to interact than with the other communities and people are really wanting to interact these days.
We are in a buyers market, twitter is a great tool which allows people to connect – good for our social needs and business needs. Other tools just don’t add value in the same way.
I am sure there is a place for all, but like the early days of search engines or any technology (remember vhs & betamax) consumers will descide based on how much value they find it.
http://twitter.com/rapidbi
http://wordpress.com/rapidbi
Wow!! I have followed your growth on twitter and now your account has grown to more than 20,000 twitters.. Your pace is the same as twitter’s.
I just started following you on Twitter. Great numbers. Great blog. Check mine out http://moimoney.com/. Let me know if you’ve viewed the epic video I posted in my blog.
Keep up the good work!
try the same graph with Facebook, MySpace and Flickr…. Twitter doesn’t even register as a blip on their radar.
twitter is the Web 3.0 ppl aren’t clear about all these couple yrs. period!
twitter is the Web 3.0 ppl aren’t clear about all these couple yrs. period!
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!
wow interesting post. I think it will definitely change what is happening on the web and how people are using it. There was a post just this morning about how Dreamweaver is now dead, or close to it because it just can’t compete with what we are doing on the internet now.
Not a surprise. Twitter is really coming up.
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NaS on Mon, 9th Mar 2009 4:23 am
twitter is the Web 3.0 ppl aren’t clear about all these couple yrs. period!
Sorry… forgot to say great post – can’t wait to read your next one!
THIS WASN’T ME! This is my first time seeing comment impersonication to hit my name, to route traffic to website…
It stand to reason that Twitter is higher on Trends because it is new. Digg, Flickr, and Delicious are all established (whatever that means) brands and should see less search queries than the new media darling.
Maybe a more interesting metric would be the number of updates posted to Twitter vs the number of updates posted to Facebook – or Myspace.
twitter.com/dporter
Xavier,
I use Twitter and Facebook, FriendFeed and LinkedIn for networking with my web marketing and broadcast tv engineering design and project management peers, more than digg or de.li.ci.ous.
Instant updates and increased ‘followers and friends’ are a direct result of using these services.
That is the way of the web, people like to connect, and Twitter makes this rapid and seamless.
Respectfully,
Nicholas Chase
http://www.twitter.com/nachase