Recently in Twitter Category

Anil Dash has an opinion piece today on CNN which basically says don't let a service like Twitter or Facebook be the only game in town. And he has a point.

I joined Twitter on May 8, 2007 on the advice of my business partner at @SpaceRef @KeithCowing. Not too long after that we participated in a NASA conference at NASA Ames on Participatory Exploration where @Biz (Stone) explained to the audience what Twitter was and it's participatory nature. Thinking on it now it's kind of ironic that Biz was giving us the talk as we were using Jaiku, a competitor then, for the conference. Jaiku is now pretty much history after Google bought it and recently decided to stop working on it and make it open source.

After listening to Biz that day I still wasn't convinced that Twitter was useful and would survive. In fact I sent an email to my contacts on LinkedIn asking what they thought of Twitter. I got back a variety of answers including; What's Twitter? To how essential some people thought Twitter would become to their business. So I decided to keep using Twitter and subsequently created over 30 new Twitter accounts for various entities I was involved in including @GeneRef, @OnOrbit, @SpaceMeme, @HMP, @Hyperix etc. I'm glad I created all those accounts because now I'm starting to get some real tangible benefit from being on Twitter and being a part of the conversation. If you don't know what Twitter is and need a quick simple primer than this recent article in the Vancouver Sun is excellent.

But what's in it for Twitter? What's the business model? (2) I don't think Twitter's not going to make money through advertising. The community could revolt and move to another platform. And if they wanted to place advertising on the service they would have, should have done so already. Twitter's not going to make money charging a fee to access the service. That would just make their audience flee and kill the exponential growth they are now experiencing. So how is Twitter going to make money? In my humble opinion the basis of how they are going to make money all started when they made their application programming interface (API) available.

Unless Twitter has released how many users they have and I'm not aware of it, then how many users they have is really up for speculation. And there is a lot of speculation going on.

I've read that Twitterholic has guestimated about 12 million users while Twitdir has just over a million in their database. If you do as I did and accidentally click the Google search this site button from the Google Firefox toolbar while on your Twitter home page, you'll get back 3,770,000 users.

I did some simple math based on when I joined and when a friend joined. He joined just about six months later than me. I joined in early May of 2007 and he joined in early December of 2007. According to Twitterholic I was user 5,870,022 while my friend was user 11,197,712. So in the six months between us there about 5 1/2 million new user accounts. That was in December of 2007, and we're now just about May of 2008. So how many news users have they added in the last 5 months? Well you would have to figure at least another 5 million bringing the total to around 16 million. But remember this is based on Twitterholic data. How accurate is it really? I don't know. And how does this mesh with the 3.7 million accounts Google has?