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Maybe twitter isn’t that popular…
Twitter has not yet become as popular as the continuing extensive media coverage surrounding it would make you believe. My evidence? Take a look at this snapshot of a Google trends query for “facebook, twitter”:
The graph on the bottom represents how I used to feel twitter was doing with their mass-market adoption. It portrays what we’ve all witnessed over the last year: all out love-fest on the part of the news media, who have embraced twitter and promoted it vigorously to viewers and readers (and with good reason: it’s a distribution service - content creators *should* love it). The effect, however, has been a bit misleading.
When you look at the numbers of Google users who are searching for ‘facebook’ or 'twitter’ (the top graph), the juxtaposition brings the hyped nature of Twitter into stark relief. It’s not that Twitter’s growth hasn’t been healthy. They have grown their product amazingly well, but the exposure we see in the news does not reflect a true wide adoption on the part of users. I’m a big fan of the Twitter team and their API approach; this isn’t a comment on the past or future success of the service. But, in an world that moves as quick as ours, it’s important to question our assumptions before they get the better of us. I previously assumed that Twitter had achieved mass market adoption; Now, I’m not so sure they have.