Twitter starts shrinking in October
After a nearly flat September, Twitter saw a whopping 8 percent drop in users during the month of October. Has the service reached critical mass long before becoming mainstream?
Looking at Twitter’s traffic numbers as reported by Comscore, the service actually stopped growing back in July. After a few months of holding steady, Twitter saw unique visitors tumble substantially in October.
This starts the downward trend of a classic bell curve. While that doesn’t signal Twitter’s imminent demise, it sure looks like there’s a problem in TwitterTown.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams is hoping that new features such as Lists, ReTweets and Geolocation will reinvigorate the service’s growth. Those are all brand new, so it’s still too soon to tell the effect of those features.
However all these new features could also drive away new users that are often bewildered at the basic functions of Twitter. These new users could be doubly confused by the addition of features like Lists.
There’s something to be said about learning the slang and how to follow conversations on Twitter to become part of the fold, but most Internet users don’t have that much patience. If there’s one thing Twitter isn’t, it’s intuitive.
Some argue that the growth numbers aren’t really indicative of Twitter’s growth based on the fact that many access Twitter through a client. However Twitter needs a decent stream of new users coming to the site in order to grow.
The drop in users could also be a sign that Twitter’s newfound popularity and features are turning off core users. The flood of ReTweets caused by the new features could bury the useful original ideas on the service.
Any way you slice it, the Twitter team must be sweating the lack of growth, especially considering it just took another round of financing. A better move might have been to sell Twitter before usage starts falling even further.
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