Twitter transformed itself from a simple, sharp SMS-serving system into a cultural phenomenon, and like most things described as “cultural phenomena” by people who don’t really understand them it’s already running into trouble. This is because Twitter’s expansion strategies are mainly “Total surprise”, “Something they totally weren’t expecting” and “Quick, quick, someone Google the phrase ‘business plan’ right now!” Read more »

The success of the Apple App Store has lead to nearly every platform creating a similar enterprise – from Blackberry, to Samsung, to Facebook. With the Apple store having surpassed 2 billion downloads everybody else wants to copy their success. Everybody that is, except Twitter. Once again Twitter seems determined to find ways to not generate revenue. However, the just launched oneforty, named for Twitter’s now famous character limit, is prepared to fill the void and be your Twitter outfitter. Read more »

Twitter is the high-tech haiku, the latest and greatest in social services that’s really going to change the way we do everything! Seriously! Not like MySpace, or Facebook, or any of the other things that mass media advertised as the end of everything that came before (but turned out to be advertising platforms loaded with preteens and people who illegally like preteens). Unfortunately the fantastic future is again unfounded, as Twitter is falling to the same problem that paralyzed previous popular sites: spambots and idiots. Read more »

My opinion of Twitter is similar to most people’s love-hate relationship with it. That is, I hated Twitter when I first signed up, I didn’t see its usefulness, and was perplexed by the features of Twitter. Like most people it took me a while to warm up to Twitter but now I’m a fan. Read more »

Last month I pointed out that Twitter’s growth rate had slowed from 76% in March to 39% in April according to Compete. Compete statistics that were recently released show that Twitter’s unique visitor traffic growth for May was stagnant at a mere 1%. To make matters worse, Quantcast has Twitter actually losing traffic in May. This should be of serious concern for Twitter and its investors as the life of Twitter’s recent popularity is still in its infancy despite arguably receiving more media hype than any web service to date. Read more »

Twitter traffic has been growing at incredible rates the past few months due to mass adoption and coverage by the media as well as celebrity endorsements. According to comScore data, traffic in terms of unique visitors at Twitter.com alone (not including traffic from Twitter apps/clients) increased by ~95% for the month of March. Compete’s traffic growth value for unique visitors in March (~76%) was similar. This morning however, Compete released its latest data for the month of April which suggests that the booming traffic growth rate that Twitter was experiencing is slowing. Read more »

The more I think about FriendFeed as a Twitter application the more sense it makes. FriendFeed has the potential to become the go-to communication service for 140+ characters. Currently when you need to continue a Twitter discussion elsewhere (because of 140 character limit), you only have two options: chat or email. Both of those choices are really inconvenient however because they require that you move the discussion to another location. Read more »

The explosion of new social networks and web applications that occurred several years ago created a need for people to keep track of one’s web content/activity over many different online services. The lifestreaming/social aggregation solution seemed to address that problem quite well and soon there were almost too many to choose from. Read more »

The world is buzzing with Twittermania these days and if you truly understand what Twitter is really about you’re not surprised by all the attention it’s getting. If you don’t understand what Twittering is or you think Twitter is just another stupid time wasting social network, I challenge you to continue reading as I am sure you will not feel the same way about it afterward. I can assure you that Twitter is not a fad or a gimmick and it’s not just the newest breed of social networks. Twitter is a powerful tool that can be used to do many things and it is unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Read more »

In case you haven’t heard, John Mayer was dumped by Jennifer Anniston because he Twitters too much and president Obama has returned to the Twittersphere. These are just a few of the many examples of how the world is becoming so infatuated with the tech juggernaut known as Twitter. Many others including well known politicians, musicians, actors, athletes, bloggers, major news sources, and television personalities are embracing Twitter to effectively connect with their fans. Read more »