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Posts Tagged ‘twitter.com’

Is the New Twitter All About the Money?

With some more time to digest the implications of the new Twitter, here are some additional thoughts on what it means.

While there’s lots of chatter about the new interface and how it’s an attempt to revitalize the no-frills Twitter.com experience, which pales in comparison to rivals such as TweetDeck and HootSuite, the real thrust of the new Twitter may have much more to do with money than the user experience (although a better user experience is a key part of the revenue equation).

By introducing the second pane, Twitter is really creating new real estate to display contextual and relevants ads in a more elegant and prominent way than inserting them into someone’s live stream. In the new pane, the ads will be displayed and have a better chance of resonating with users, which is good for advertisers and, in the process, good for users interested in relevant ads.

Twitter has come to a point where he needs to hammer down on generating revenue. With more than 125 million users, it has achieved critical mass. This provides Twitter with a very solid platform to turn on the monetization machine.

The big question is how Twitter makes that happen, which is where the new Twitter comes into play. The strange part is how long it took Twitter to reach this point everyone recognized that relevant advertising was such an obvious way to make money.

With the new Twitter being rolled out, Twitter now has an attractive platform to attract advertisers. So in many ways, Twitter is really opening its doors for business.

What do you think?

More: For some additional insight, check out ex-Twitter employee Alex Payne’s blog post.

By Mark Evans - September 16th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

Twitter 2.O: Much Ado About Nothing?

So, Twitter has applied a fresh coat of paint on Twitter.com – something that has, not surprisingly, captured the imagination of the blogosphere, which celebrates anything new from the world’s leading micro-blogging service.

The question is whether the new design for Twitter.com is really that significant or whether it’s simply Twitter making changes to something that was, frankly, utilitarian but far from compelling.

The strange part about Twitter.com is how bad is looks and behaves compared with a lot of other online and desktop alternatives such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, Brizzly and JournoTwit. Many Twitter users may start with Twitter.com but soon move on to something else once they get a good feel for how Twitter works and how Twitter.com is far from satisfying.

While Twitter plans to roll out the new design over the next couple of week, the big difference is now features two panes, rather than the single pane interface with the right-hand side that displays your profile, number of friends and followers, etc. This will let Twitter show the content of tweets, including photos and videos, within Twitter.com.

For anyone who uses something else other than Twitter.com, the obvious response may be: “That’s it. That’s the new Twitter.com?”.

After all, we’re talking about people who are using multiple columns to monitor their live streams, replies, direct messages, and lots of relevant or interesting keywords.

And while Twitter is apparently planning more enhancements to Twitter.com in the coming months, other players are also pressing ahead with new features. TweetDeck, for example, lets you post to multiple social media services, while HootSuite lets you post and view multiple services.

The reality for Twitter is it may always lag far behind what third-parties are offering no matter how many improvements it makes. But the real question is whether what Twitter is doing will be enough to stem the flow of defections.

At some point, Twitter could have enough features on Twitter.com that will give people what they need without any more frills. It may not happen with this re-design (see below) but it seems like Twitter may finally be getting serious about how users actually use Twitter.

By Mark Evans - September 15th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Social Media

Focus On: Twitter Publishing Tools Market Share

Over the past six months, we’ve taken several in-depth looks at Twitter and how people are using it. This includes the tools and services being used to post and read tweets. As Twitter becomes more popular, the number of publishing alternatives continues to expand in lockstep.

To get a better idea of how people are using Twitter, Sysomos looked at two three-week periods – one in June and another in November – to create comparative snapshots. Not surprisingly, Twitter.com’s market share in terms of how often it is used dropped to 40.5% from 45.7%.

Among the biggest market share losses were posted by Tweetdeck which dropped to 8.75% of total tweets from 19.7% in June; Echofon, which used to be Twitterfox and Twitterfon, dropped to 4.9% from 7.6%; and TwitterBerry, which fell to 0.62% from 1.7%.

The market share winners included UberTwitter, a popular Blackberry application, which climbed to 6.74% from 1.8%; Seesmic, which now offers desktop software and a Web-based tool, rose to 1.26% from 1.1%; Twitterrific, an iPhone app, increased to 1.67% from 1.2%, while Twidroid, a client for Android devices, climbed to 1.25% from 0.8%.

Here’s a chart of the leading Twitter services and tools in November 2009. (Note: The “web” is Twitter.com)

Screen shot 2009-12-08 at 7.53.36 PM

And here’s a chart of the leading Twitter tools and services for June 2009

Screen shot 2009-12-08 at 7.53.49 PM

By Mark Evans - December 9th, 2009 - 5 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

How Do You Use Twitter?

An interesting part of Twitter’s growth story are the growing number of alternatives to Twitter.com to publish and read updates.

The problem with Twitter.com is it has a no-frills interface that has become far less user-friendly and intuitive compared with third-party tools such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic, HootSuite, CoTweet, Tweepler and Tweetie.

So, how many people are using something other than Twitter.com to use Twitter?

In our first “Inside Twitter” report, which involved indexing 11.4 million Twitter accounts, we discovered that nearly 55% of Twitter users use something else other than Twitter.com. The most popular clients are Tweetdeck (19.7%), TwitterFon (4.5%) and Twitterfeed (3.8%).

sysomos-twitter-clients

While our report suggests the majority of Twitter users are not using Twitter.com, a new report from Rapleaf suggests that 65% of all updates come from Twitter.com. Twitter via SMS is the second-most popular (6%), followed by Tweetdeck (4%), the mobile Web (4%) and Twitterfon (3%).

twitter-market-share

So, how do you use Twitter? If you use something other than Twitter.com, what’s your tool of choice?

By Mark Evans - August 20th, 2009 - 2 Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Samples, Social Media

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