users

comScore stats on mobile Twitter usage

March 7, 2010 By Dan Thornton

A belated look at a recent report from comScore which shows Twitter is the fastest growing social network on mobile, with growth of 347% since 2009.

The number of users in January 2010 reached 4.7 million – compared to just over 1 million in January 2009, giving a 4.47 multiple increase. Twitter’s 347% growth compares with Facebooks 112% (But Facebook still rules with 25 million mobile users), and Myspace declining 7%.

But to be 1/5th of Facebooks size and growing 3 times as quickly shows Twitter is looking even more promising on mobile than on the fixed internet.

Twitter growing in visitors and content

February 17, 2010 By Dan Thornton

With the caveat that it doesn’t cover third party applications, comScore puts visits to Twitter at 75 million – and regardless of the correlation between those numbers and the actual figures, what you can take away is that the graph is still going up and to the right:

It certainly seems anecdotally as if I’m witnessing more colleagues and friends not only using Twitter, but attempting to use it in a fairly sustainable way rather than registering, looking confused and then vanishing again.

Meanwhile the amount of content being produced has also risen – to a whopping 1.2 billion tweets per month according to data collected by Royal Pingdom.

The methodology used to collect the figures was pretty simple:

‘we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself’

Again, while there could be some debate about the accuracy of the actual figures involved, what’s important is that the overall effect is some consistent and sizeable growth. And that’s in the face of the redesign of Facebook – the next challenger on the list is GoogleBuzz, but so far I’ve found it rather unsatisfactory, even apart from the initial privacy issues.

A good clue to Twitter’s growth rates

August 4, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Although comScore only measures visits to Twitter.com, and more than half of Twitter users use clients and apps, it does provide a clue to Twitter’s growth rates.

In June it gained around 7 million new visitors, hitting 44.5 million unique global visitors, up 19 per cent from May 2009, and now making it the 52nd biggest site in the world (and with a 55 per cent international audience).

Techcrunch points to the Iran election as a contributor to the growth, while Mark Evans over at Twitterati somewhat confusingly uses comScore and Compete figures to calculate a 50-50 U.S and International split.

For the record, the biggest properties measured by comScore are Google sites, Microsoft sites, Yahoo sites, Facebook and Wikimedia Foundation sites.

Followformation joins the directory of Twitter directories

July 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Want to find Twitter users to follow? There are already a fair number of directories out there, but Followformation offers a slightly different approach.

Whereas Twellow, WeFollow or Just Tweet It display lists for users to explore and manually add followers, you can now select your area of interest, and automatically follow the Top 10 to Top 50 people listed on followformation.

The rankings within each area of interest, e.g. Sports, or Social Media, are all defined by follower counts, so essentially you’re just grabbing the most-followed people who have an interest in their profile.

The only people I can see getting much value from the service are new users, as it’s at least slightly more relevant than the Suggested User List.

Want evidence of end user control?

April 3, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you really want to underline the way control is now being shared with an ever greater number of people historically know as your ‘audience’, then show people the increasing rise of Firefox browser usage – then show them Greasemonkey.

Now Firefox isn’t the most used browser globally – Internet Explorer still rules, and Google’s Chrome certainly has some advantages and enthusiastic adopters. But whether or not Firefox ever dominates the browser market, the influence of the open source approach, add-ons and plug-ins is undeniable. It’s the reason that many people, including myself, might use Chrome for certain tasks for speed, but can’t give up the utility of plugins which offer everything from easy ways to see the way a page is coded, to Swedish spellchecking, mouse gestures and more.

But why is Greasemonkey so incredibly important?

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows users to install scripts on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. Greasemonkey can be used for adding new functions to web pages (for example, embedding price comparison in Amazon.com web pages), fixing rendering bugs, combining data from multiple webpages, and numerous other purposes. From Wikipedia.

So that means:

You can spend as much time and money as you like on designing your webpage, but if I want to disable elements, change the layout, or do whatever I like, I can.

For instance, Facebook’s redesign angered many people – so if you want to hide the Highlights sidebar, just install one of three Greasemonkey options.

Or you can just emulate the old Facebook design.

And what’s really interesing?

As a website owner/publisher, I’m not aware of any way you’d know this was happening via analytics (And I’ve asked a few metrics/analytics types before posting), and you wouldn’t know what users are adding to your site to improve their experience, and possibly conversion rates.

(If you do know ways to track any of that information automatically, I’d love you to share it in the comments.)

Your users would though.

Resources:

You can keep up with the Greasemonkey blog at Greasespot, and find Userscripts for it at Userscripts.org. Please do keep in mind that you’re installing code which may in a very small amount of cases have been created by people who aren’t 100% lovely, so do some research before adding new scripts. Or just don’t blame this post if you kill the internet by accident.