Growth of Twitter vs. Blogger
Further update: The Twitter data is bad, bad, bad, rendering Andy's post and most of this here post useless. Both jumps in Twitter activity in Nov 2006 and March 2007 are artificial in nature. See here for an update. — Update: A commenter noted …
Context & Ripple Effects
Measuring new publishing services by their growth curves was established practice before this post: Sifry's Alerts had been charting blogosphere expansion since its February 2006 state-of-the-blogosphere analysis, setting the template Kottke applies here by plotting Twitter against Blogger.
The post matters because it breaks that template mid-application. Days after Twitter opened its m.twitter.com mobile web interface in early May 2007 — and two months after Twitter and Dodgeball emerged as the flaunted rival social-messaging services at SXSW 2007 — Kottke concludes that both visible jumps in Twitter activity (November 2006 and March 2007) are artificial, discrediting his own comparison and Andy's underlying post.
First-order effects
- Kottke's own Twitter-vs-Blogger comparison and Andy's post are rendered useless: the November 2006 and March 2007 activity spikes were artifacts, so anyone citing those curves is working from bad data.
- With third-party measurement discredited, judgments about whether Twitter's rise is real fall back on anecdotes like its SXSW 2007 visibility rather than on charts.
Second-order effects
- The burden of credible growth numbers shifts toward first-party disclosure — whoever publishes reliable usage stats controls the Twitter-versus-incumbents narrative that bloggers and analysts are actively trying to write.
- Comparisons between Twitter and Dodgeball, and between microblogging and blogging generally, become contested precisely because no trusted instrument exists yet for the newer service.
Third-order effects
- If adoption of fast-growing consumer services keeps outrunning the tools that measure it, the blog-era habit of tracking growth through open public data gives way to platform-published statistics — a structural change in who arbitrates growth claims.
The trend: Microblogging's growth is being measured with blogging-era instruments that are failing under it, pushing adoption narratives from open data toward whatever metrics platforms themselves disclose.