> Most everyone else tried to find a use for Twitter but couldn’t. I know many early users that either abandoned or deleted their accounts before 2010.
So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?
So what changed? Why did twitter eventually become so popular?
You can see in the article above that even in 2013 they were talking about Twitter's rise to prominence beginning in 2008.
Twitter was/is a fantastic resource for one-to-many social media communication. Celebrities flocked to it. Media publications analyzed it and ran stories on the platform. The API used to be quite open and basically free so it plugged into countless apps and was often used in hackathon projects. Hash tags became signal for trending topics. Even the public '@' tag (don't 'at' me bro) basically came from Twitter (or was at least, popularized by it). It was a phenomenon. Reaching 10% of Facebook's reach is hardly anything to scoff at (who had hit 1 billion users around the same time), and dwarfed the population of nearly every nation on earth. Twitter had outsized influence on the public conversation because you could get a message out to millions from a single account, which wasn't possible with Facebook due to friend requests (at the time, Facebook was more purely a friend-to-friend network and pretty sure you were restricted to at most 5K friends).
Twitter didn't even require a login to view Tweets. Embedded views in other apps helped to cement its virality.
I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but it was not ubiquitous.
https://searchengineland.com/twitter-hits-100-million-active...
It was not as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it was certainly more ubiquitous than RSS by a long shot.
Basically anyone with a professional presence that involves talking to the public, publishing papers, blogs, open source projects, etc still uses Twitter to talk to the public. Lot of these people have a hidden or deactivated Facebook, but public Twitter.
How much more ubiquitous in this regard is Twitter than Facebook (as a percentage) and what real world impact does that number have?
People, in general, tend to invent their own reality. There are smart terms to describe that behavior from a variety of causes but dummies like me just tend to call it bullshit.
Had to google, might save someone time.
It took many years for Twitter to become valuable and has since lost most of that value. It did not become profitable until 2018 and then became negative again in 2021. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Twitter usage is also way down, but most analysts stopped using things like account numbers, message quantity, and visitor counts to account for any real concern years ago because most of it was determined to come from bots.
Twitter popularity is illusory. Its a broadcast system that the majority of its users, whether people or bots, solely sought to exploit for offsite metrics.
Regardless of what you think people used Twitter for, there are real-world consequences from people using Twitter to communicate with each other. The Arab Spring is probably the biggest example for that, where people used it for activism, while the governments tried to ban it and survive the uprisings happening all around the Arab world.
The use of social media (and Twitter specifically) is well studied as well, in case you're open to learning more: https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=arab+spring
> Twitter has 421 million monthly active users, adding 20 million in 2023
It's as popular is its ever been, however, there's been some rotation in demographics I suspect.
Whether this is true or not depends a lot on the social circle you are talking about. I am aware of quite a lot of people who abandoned Twitter after it became more closed with respect to the API, but I am also aware of quite a lot of people who nevertheless did stay.
i wasn't in the super earlybirds users, but this is what i get from having used it. like any other social media really. trick people that its cool somehow and start shoving crap down all their senses you can reach.
platforms which don't do this, dont get big because they are kept small.
(maybe a bit cynical post, but i don't think its wrong.)
(Also Telegram and WhatsApp are a borderline case; they have the users, and they have social-network-like features, but most of the users are likely not _using_ the social-network-like features; they just use them as messaging apps).
The second tier is things like Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora; these are in the 300-600 million user range, so they're big, but you don't have the same sort of universal exposure.