Remember my Twitter is the new “Facebook” post from last March where I posited Twitter was going to be the next darling in terms of social tools? It seems my gut feeling was right on that front as shown by Compete’s report on Twitter’s traffic and online attention growth in the last 3 months.
Highlights:
- “In terms of U.S. visitors, Compete has seen Twitter traffic nearly double from February to April, currently attracting nearly 1.2 million people per month.
- In terms of time spent on site as a share of all time spent online, Twitter has grown dramatically - more than quadrupling over the period.
- Twitter is a weekday event – (…) On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day.
- Nearly one quarter of all twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (6+ visits/month)
- Splitting age demographics based on usage intensity shows that heavy users tend to skew older than visitors who only hit the site once a month. This could indicate that while the younger segments are more exploratory, the 25-44 year old segments have found more value in Twitter and started to ramp up usage.”
What it means: based on Rogers’ innovation adoption curve, I think we’ve seen the arrival of early adopters on Twitter. The first wave, innovators, had joined the service at SXSW 2007. The weekday usage and the older demographics make me think there’s a lot of work-based usage and that most people in the Weberati have discovered Twitter’s value.
Posted by Sebastien on the 2008/05/13 at 11:30
in GPS, Local, Mapping - 2 Comments
Read in the latest issue of Checkerspot, the official magazine of the The Canadian Wildlife Federation, an article about eco-friendly burials.
Natural burial grounds do more than just reduce pollutants otherwise caused by cremation and traditional burials. Some eco-cemeteries function as wild spaces, marking graves with local rocks and flora rather than headstones, keeping track of burial plots through GPS locators.
What it means: the last thing you will be remembered for is a lat/long number… That’s a mapping mash-up waiting to happen, virtual burial grounds displayed on a worldwide map.
Praized Media’s CTO and co-founder Sylvain Carle is attending Where 2.0 conference this week in Burlingame. The conference is at the San Francisco Airport Marriott, right next door to SFO. If you’re attending and would like to connect, send him an e-mail at sylvain AT praized DOT com.
I was doing more thinking about Rob Barrett’s Latimes.com presentation I heard at the Kelsey conference last week. The decision to re-center their online strategy around hyperlocal is one of the sanest, most courageous and possibly most difficult strategic decisions I’ve heard come out of a traditional media group in a long long time.
Why? I was re-reading this blog post conclusion I wrote 15 months ago, “In a few years, you might find only authoritative international newspaper brands (New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, La Stampa, The Globe & Mail, etc.) and strong hyperlocal newspapers. All the ones in the middle will either have evolved or died.”
I suspect that building one of those big international newspaper brands is perceived as the holy grail of the newspaper industry and you can easily imagine that, for many years, the Los Angeles Times management team believed they would be one of those. Moving their online strategy to hyperlocal wasn’t a very sexy and exciting decision but it’s exactly what is needed to make the LA Times brand succeed online.
In light of the latest Kelsey Conference in Seattle last week whose theme was “vertical marketplaces”, I read with great interest this eMarketer article about online communities. Analyzing a portion of the “2008 Digital Future Project“(.pdf) report produced by the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, eMarketer reports that “nearly half of US Internet users (…) said they belonged to a hobby-oriented online community, a full 41% of respondents belonged to an online social community, and one-third belonged to an online professional community.”
The following graph shows the types of communities users belong to:
eMarketer also quotes a recent The Economist article that said “… that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph. Ning, a fast-growing company with offices directly across the street from Facebook in Palo Alto, is built around this idea. It lets users build their own social networks for each circle of friends.”
What it means: I’ve often mentioned how much I like this Wired article about meganiches. I’ve often said that I’m a strong proponent of media “verticalization”. I therefore believe Ning is onto something really big as the social Web becomes more distributed.
On the second day of the Kelsey Drilling Down 2008 Conference, we heard from Rich Barton, Chairman and CEO, Zillow. He exposed us to his thesis that lead to the various projects he’s been involved in in the last 10 years. Before founding Zillow, Barton founded Expedia when he was at Microsoft. His basic thesis is that transparency of information is power. This leads to a consumer revolution in various verticals, releasing things that were locked-up, especially around big financial decisions. He mentioned stockbroking, t
