Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Twitter is growing...BIG TIME!

As I mentioned before, Twitter is without a doubt a disruptive innovation in many different aspects and specially in premium text message/short messages (PSMS). As a definition, disruptive innovation is a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by lowering price or designing for a different set of consumers. Twitter's traffic is growing by leaps and bounds. The latest statistics based on comScore are:






And based on the latest keynote by Twitter CEO Evan Williams, the numbers are simple staggering:
  • 105 million registered users and they add 300k uses every day
  • 3 billion API request a day (equivalent to Yahoo traffic)
  • 55 million new tweets every day
  • 600 million search queries every day
  • 175 employees
  • 75% traffic comes from third party clients
  • 60% tweets come from third party clients
  • 100,000 registered apps
  • 180 million unique visitors on Twitter.com (you don’t have to be a user)
  • FlockDB, their social graph database that they just open sourced, stores 13 billion edges
  • They started using "Murder" a new BitTorrent platform to transfer files during development. This reduced the transfer time from 40 minutes to 12 seconds
  • Made deals with 65 (telco) carriers
  • 37% of active users use Twitter on their phone (@ev wants this number to be 100%)

What does this means for those companies that have their core strategy based on premium SMS? To be honest, I'm not sure. I do know that if your strategy is to offer text messages to DJs or SMS through TV tickers, then that's no a good long strategy. And as I mentioned previously, neither is a "joke" or "horoscope" subscription for $6.99. The bottom line is that it is hard as it is to fight against a trend such as Twitter, but it is even a bigger challenge to change someone minds about a brand or a product. Currently, Twitter is the de facto of users to communicate their thoughts to the world using mobile phones.

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