Another sign that Twitter may be scaring developers away

royal.pingdom.com

14 pointsdotBen4 comments

Ugh, I hate when people try to extrapolate from search trends. There are a million reasons that line could go up or down. Maybe since the twitter API is linked from the bottom of every single page on twitter.com, fewer people need to search it?

We may even be drawing the wrong conclusions, but you have to admit that those graphs are telling a pretty convincing story.

No, I don't have to admit that.

Maybe it's just a sign that Twitter is reaching a broader, less technical market. Compare Facebook to Facebook API on Google Trends and the latter barely registers.

The graph of "Facebook API" to "Twitter API" rebuts this argument. Growth in Facebook searches is correlated to growth in Facebook API searches. But Twitter searches have grown while growth in Twitter API searches have turned around.

Of course there are tons of problems with drawing any conclusions from Google Trends but it's an interesting point to raise.

But Facebook started off with a non-technical audience and Twitter started off with an extremely technical audience

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