Bailout

Twitter datapoint of the day

By Felix Salmon

Is Twitter becoming less social and more of a news feed, where people just follow celebrities rather than interacting with their friends? Julianne Pepitone of CNN Money would have you think so:

A whopping 73% of Twitter accounts have tweeted fewer than 10 times according to a new report from Barracuda Networks, a Web security company.

It seems that Twitter is becoming more of a news feed than a social network, said Paul Judge, author of the report and chief research officer at Barracuda. And that raises questions about its growth potential, as well as how the Internet phenomenon will make money.

But the indirect quote is telling, here, because my guess is that Judge never said what Pepitone says that he said. I’m pretty sure of this, because if you look at his long blog entry about the report, the trends are clear, and are showing that Twitter is becoming more social over time:

26 percent of users now have at least (?) 10 followers, showing a 30 percent increase since June when only 20 percent of users had at least (?) 10 followers.

40 percent of users are following at least (?) 10 user accounts, showing an 18 percent increase since June.

27 percent of users have tweeted 10 times or more, showing a 29 percent increase since June.

These numbers might be higher or lower than your intuition, but the one thing that’s clear is that they’re rising, and that they’re rising at pretty substantial annual growth rates. Meanwhile, the percentage of users who have not tweeted since they created an account has fallen, to 34% in December from 37% in June. So why the weird negative spin from Pepitone? Is it ‘cos she only has 58 followers herself?

Full post as published by Macroprudential on March 11, 2010 (boomark / email).