If someone here needed another proof to the change twitter has made, Nielsen released its Social Media QuickTake for May 2009, showing an amazing 1,444% growth in Twitter.com visitors – from 1.2m in May 2008 to 18.2m in May 2009. Wow! Time spent on twitter.com per person (not factoring the twitter apps I imagine) has also risen – from 6min in May 2008 to 17min a year later (+175%). Both are amazing figures, showcasing the revolution twitter has made in 2008/9 – starting with The US Presidential Election, the Earthquakes in China and the Elections in Iran.
The question now is ‘what’s next’, for twitter, facebook and others, as they reach super-mass adoption, and would (obviously) prefer to avoid ‘the myspace phenomenon‘. Nielsen already noticed that the ‘month-over-month’ rate is very minor: +7% in # of users and -1% in time spent – which in social networking terms is bad. That halt in growth has to do in part to the business model, or lack of it.
Twitter is a lot of things, and I salute the guys for providing the platform and building an impressive ecosystem, but at some point in time someone at Twitter HQ will need to step up and present what they plan for twitter in 2010.
