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rfmcdonaldMy RSS news aggregator pointed me last week to an interesting post at the Hubspot Blog, Pete Warden's analysis of the details--geography, speed--of Twitter's growth. It turns out to be pretty spiky, with a steep growth curve.
Early 2007 saw significant growth, after Twitter's successful launch at South-by-Southwest. Warden's conclusion?
As commenters note, it's a minor shame that Warden didn't analyze Twitter's international growth. I'd love to see how Canada fared--I bet Québec lags behind English Canada in Twitter adoption, just as it did in Facebook adoption, but that both solitudes are well ahead most of the rest of the world.
The first public mention of the service I can find is on Evan William's blog late on July 13th, but you can see that even on the 12th there was a mini-boom in registrations. Then Om Malik's post on the 15th really pushed it over the top, with more than 250 people signing up the next day. What I find fascinating is that there were less than 600 people on the service at that point, so it was a very prescient plug. Encouraging for those of us with our own startups is the flattening of the growth curve after the initial spike from the publicity - it's always painful to go through the come-down after the adrenaline boost of a rush of visitors.
Early 2007 saw significant growth, after Twitter's successful launch at South-by-Southwest. Warden's conclusion?
What surprised me most was how little geography mattered for adoption. Even in today's world of ubiquitous internet access, I expected that real-life clusters of friends would be the main vectors by which the service would spread. I don't see the sort of city-specific growth spurts I'd expect if that were true, instead the network took root wherever there were people. That has some interesting implications for anyone starting their own service, it looks like focusing on virtual communities instead of physical ones can be very effective.
I'd also never thought of Twitter as an aspirational service, but Neha nailed the atmosphere of the early days. There was an air of exclusivity, of access to an interesting group of Valley rockstars, that gave people a reason to check it out. This feels a lot like the way that Facebook started at Ivy League colleges and then opened up progressively to lower-status groups with the promise of mixing with a 'better class' of people. That might explain why companies like Google have such a hard time launching similar services, catering to the masses they can't pretend they're exclusive, but it bodes well for Quora's approach.
The reality of its rapid adoption all over the country is hard to square with its image as an exclusive Valley club, but maybe that contradiction is the sign of exquisite marketing. Apple gives their users that same sensation of belonging to an elite, even as they sell products in malls across the country. Twitter tapped into people whose dreams were in Silicon Valley, wherever they were in the world.
As commenters note, it's a minor shame that Warden didn't analyze Twitter's international growth. I'd love to see how Canada fared--I bet Québec lags behind English Canada in Twitter adoption, just as it did in Facebook adoption, but that both solitudes are well ahead most of the rest of the world.
