Is Twitter saturated? | Hacker News Reader

Is Twitter saturated?

siteanalytics.compete.com

22 pointsflavio8729 comments

This is the 3rd time someone has posted something like this (once by the same submitter http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880575).

It's a fairly useless metric to look at second hand reports of twitter's website traffic. If you have a bump in new users they would naturally use the website, as some of them left and the users who stuck around learned how to use 3rd party clients you would see a drop in website traffic.

Now does it signify that twitter isn't picking up new users at the same pace, perhaps. But when you think about the last 12 months I am not sure how they could sustain that pace (between Obama, Oprah, etc).

Where is there concrete evidence that a significant chunk of Twitter users use 3rd party apps?

Desktop apps have horrible conversion rates, and I don't see why Twitter apps in particular have any reason to buck this trend. Whenever there are articles like these about Twitter's traffic numbers, people always bring up 3rd party app traffic making up the difference, but nobody ever provides any references to back that up.

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2007/09/10/twitter-api-traff...

That's raw API traffic, not user numbers.

An app that polls Twitter every minute is of course going to generate a lot of requests. But if only 10% of Twitter users use 3rd party apps, the web metrics are still more meaningful than API use.

Majority of Twitter users use a third party app:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_users_and_the_t...

On the one hand, I don't think Twitter numbers can be considered stable at all, because it's not something that people get right away. They also haven't really defined themselves as a company, and the product has so many directions it could go in, any of which could change the growth profile.

But on the other hand, Twitter is something that many people will always find vapid and narcissistic. Facebook has been trying to push people in this direction as well, but they have a compelling feature set that draws people in even if that have to block half of their loud-mouthed friends. Twitter has lots of potential (via their API if nothing else), but even if they can build up their third-party ecosystem to rival Facebook, I don't think you can't capture a mass market with a hodgepodge of tools that user's have to discover and set up for themselves.

Frankly I think Evan and Biz should have sold in the spring.

So my startup uses Twitter as an extension of our news aggregator, as another way to distribute links that "go popular" with our users.

Since June, we've kept up our same tweeting frequency and the quality of the stories has even shot up a bit.

But referrals, click-thru's and retweets are down to about half of what they were in August. We were scratching our heads about this for a while. Maybe a lot of the folks living on Twitter over the summer, retweeting our stuff moved on to some shiny new toy once fall hit?

Are you using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed, or are you participating in conversation?

> Are you using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed

Isn't that what it is? (totally serious here)

If you just use it for that, you're missing out on a lot.

Yes, technically speaking, it's a glorified RSS feed. But due to the presentation and the way people use it, it's more than that.

Check out, for example, the Dell Outlet. http://twitter.com/DellOutlet Dell made $6.5 million from this Twitter account. Why? Because they actually engage in discussions with their customers. It's an incredibly powerful way to reach people that are buying your stuff. Part of the reason I'm still a Verizon customer is because I got frustrated with their service, complained on Twitter, and within 15 minutes, I got an @reply and then a dm from a rep, who got actual real CSRs to call me, and my stuff got fixed.

You’re forgetting the IM half.

Either way, we've done exactly the same thing throughout the whole period.

Yes, but it's possible that people got bored and unsubscribed. I have no real idea, just throwing some ideas out there.

We've gained followers over same period.

An increase in followers is not the same as an increase in engagement.

It's not just Twitter. http://twittercism.com/twitter-growth-nov-09

Is it "Social Networks"?

Is this just visits directly to twitter.com? or does it reflect visits via twitter's api?

I presume it's direct visits. But looking at the charts for seesmic and tweetdeck, if we assume the cumulative unique visitors to these two services in the past year all downloaded and use the service at least once a month, it adds maybe 5-10m users at a guess.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/seesmic.com+tweetdeck.com/

there are also a large group of people who only use twitter on their iphones/blackberrys, its probably hard to say anything from stats from compete.

This is equally true for Facebook, which isn't showing a declining trend.

I think it is true that many people are updating their facebook status from their phones, but I would guess that many of those same people are still going to the website be it to look at photos they have recently been tagged in or play Farmville.

I think the original comment was saying that many people strictly use twitter from their phone or third-party app. There isn't much on twitter that draws an established user to the website like there is with facebook.

That is exactly what I meant, and that was exactly my point. Twitter wants to become a service provider. It seems it doesn't care so much about you visiting the site as much as it cares about you using the service it provides.

How this translates into twitter making money, we don't know yet, but it seems like it is the direction they are going with Chirp( http://chirp.twitter.com/ ) and with talk of giving more developers access to the firehose.

Even if it doesn't track the API, the plateau still reflects the declining amount of users signing up (those have to visit front page).

That argument doesn't make sense to me - what if people adopt 3rd party Twitter clients faster than the rate of new signups? You would have a net loss in web traffic even if new-user growth was increasing.

fb's pageviews have flattened as well, according to compete.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com/

Why do these numbers seem low..? I checked FB only to find that their monthly uniques were 130 million.. Weren't they recently claiming 350 million active users?

If I remember right, Compete is only reporting user in the U.S. which explain the low numbers.

compete.com gives us 50,000 uniques even though we have 600,000 in Google Analytics. Their numbers are just universally low as far as I know.

Considering that twitter experienced something like 500% growth in 2009, it's probably for the best.

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