14 DAY TRIAL // The real-time web has been one of the biggest trends of 2009 and one that is likely to play an important role in 2010. Yet, even as everyone agrees on its importance and that it is growing, very few people have actual numbers to back up these assumptions. Twitter would be one, of course, but apart from saying that it's seeing one of its biggest days last week, we don't have any form of measurable data. Part of the problem is that the real-time web, certainly when it comes to Twitter, is spread across several sites, platforms and technologies. But, that is also part of the solution as third-parties are able to shed some light on the situation when Twitter itself won't.
Betaworks CEO John Borthwick has posted an analysis and some rather thorough data regarding Twitter usage, based on the info gathered from its many Twitter-related proprieties. Betaworks is the company behind Bit.ly, the biggest URL shortener out there, TweetDeck, the most popular Twitter client and Twitterfeed, a tool for publishing RSS feeds on the microbloging site.
He attempted to get a grasp on the size of the real-time web, i.e. the number of users and the amount of content associated with it, based on internal data and outside, public info available. As far as web analytics firms tell US, Twitter.com traffic has stalled for several months now in the US, as well as internationally to a lesser degree. Visitors to the site are at about 20 million every month in the US. Yet, the entire Twitter ecosystem, meaning desktop and mobile clients, third-party sites and services, is bound to be bigger, significantly bigger in all likelihood. But how much bigger?
Well, according to Borthwick, actual Twitter users are at about 60 million per month in the US, three times the audience the site attracts. That is to say, 40 million people don't visit Twitter.com in a month, yet, still use the service in one form or another. He warns though that the number isn't to be taken as an exact measurement or estimate of the usage, instead it's just an indicator of how big the ecosystem really is.
"I used Google Trends and compiled data for Twitter and the key clients. I then scaled that chart over the Twitter.com traffic. Is it correct? — no. Is it made up? — no. It’s a proxy and this is what it looks like," he explained his methods.
The post also had some other interesting, and more accurate, statistics which should also serve as an indicator of the growth the real-time web is still seeing. For example, he says that Bit.ly is seeing one of its biggest usage to date, with 564 million clicked links in the first week of 2010. What's more, January 6 was the biggest day ever with 98 million clicks on shortened links. Tweetdeck is also seeing some record numbers, the app's users posted 4,143,687 tweets on January 8, 48 per second as Borthwick notes.
