Hacker News Reader

Comment by therealarmen | Hacker News Reader

Early Reports indicate that App.net is not generating very much user engagement. In fact, most of their 10,000 daily posts come from about 250 users, a far shot from Twitter’s 150 million users and 350 million tweets.

That's not a fair comparison. How many users did Twitter have a month after launching?

View on HN

Indeed. I keep seeing these sorts of posts all over the place today... "Ohnoes, App.Net doesn't have millions of users yet - it's a failure." Rubbish. It's been around a month or so, and is only really known in tech-circles at the moment. They have managed to convince a significant number of people to sign up for a service when they can access a larger competitor for _free_. That in itself is a pretty big success.

It's too early to call App.Net a success or failure. Maybe it got too much press too early, and that has given people unrealistic expectations? I say come back and look at the numbers in 12-18 months. Then we'll be looking at a mature service, and will know how many users they added, or convinced to renew their subscription.

The number of users is irrelevant when measuring user engagement, at least when it is defined as the article describes. (But comparing early app.net versus a more mature Twitter may be relevant.)

To calculate user engagement they should take the number of daily posts and divide by the number of users (so with these numbers, for Twitter it is 350 million/150 million = 2.33 and for app.net it is 10,000/[# of app.net users...20,000 according to the study linked to by diego] = 0.5. This isn't necessarily the best metric since somebody could easily write a bot that makes several posts per second, which could skew things considerably. (I don't think anyone cares about how active peoples' bots are.)

It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users.

"It is quite possible that Twitter has a similar situation where most tweets come from a smaller number of users"

It's not only possible, it's certain. The average Twitter user doesn't tweet very much. I don't know if it's 5% or 1% that's responsible for half the tweets (I could find out), but it's definitely a small minority. This is expected for every content-based social network.

http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-20...

Agree, that doesn't mean anything. My study was misinterpreted: those users are generating a TON of posts. The top poster has close to 6000. There is a long tail of thousands of users who are pretty engaged. They are just not posting like crazy!

Here's the earlier discussion of my post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4487816

At the same time it has received a ton of press up-front, in exactly the circles early adopters of the service would frequent. I think there is a feeling (right or wrong) that if the problems App.net purports to solve were really as bad as claimed, people would have been jumping on in droves, at least to give it a good spin around the block.

Its actually quite fair. When Twitter launched there was no Twitter. Now App.net is basically Twitter for a certain segment of the market. You can compare them now because people are already familiar with and have proved to be ready to adopt the idea. Now if App.net was a direct competitor from the early days of Twitter then it'd be less fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com