"You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure." ...which is owned by a single company. The bigger twitter becomes, the more this worries me.
>> "So the links I put out into Twitter in the past 30 days generated almost 39,000 clicks. Nice. But only 10,000 of those clicks happened on Twitter.com. The rest happened elsewhere in the Twitter ecosystem,"
Surely most of the rest happened on other twitter clients, where the referrer won't usually be set? Since most people don't use twitter.com to tweet, is this surprising?
No -- but it's the first time people have tried to quantify how much bigger the non-twitter.com ecosystem is than its twitter.com counterpart. Most news reports on the growth of twitter base their report on Twitter's comcast score. Fred's just making the point that the true size of twitter is much larger.
He's confusing clicks with visits, which is probably the largest source of his discrepancy. In a nutshell clicks are a count of times a browser requests a page while visits are unique browser sessions: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?...