Category Archives: Social software

Twitter is Growing Like Crazy: Up 422% in 12 Months

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Thanks to Mashable

September 16, 2008 – 2:09 pm PDT – by Adam Ostrow 3 Comments

The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.

Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average – a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.

Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to narrow the gap on MySpace, a trend we also noticed last month. Unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year. MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors – up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year.

Some other trends worth noting:

– LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors

– Imeem fell from 3.9 million unique visitors in July to 3.4 million in August. They could be one of the more impacted companies from this month’s expected launch of MySpace Music.

– Buzznet traffic fell 54% year-over-year to 1.8 million unique visitors. The company has recently made a number of acquisitions including Idolator and Qloud to bolster its audience.

Talk amongst yourselves: inviting users to participate in online conversations

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International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

“Many small online communities would benefit from increased diversity or activity in their membership. Some communities run the risk of dying out due to lack of participation. Others struggle to achieve the critical mass necessary for diverse and engaging conversation. But what tools are available to these communities to increase participation? Our goal in this research was to spark contributions to the movielens.org discussion forum, where only 2% of the members write posts.

“We developed personalized invitations, messages designed to entice users to visit or contribute to the forum. In two field experiments, we ask (1) if personalized invitations increase activity in a discussion forum, (2) how the choice of algorithm for intelligently choosing content to emphasize in the invitation affects participation, and (3) how the suggestion made to the user affects their willingness to act. We find that invitations lead to increased participation, as measured by levels of reading and posting. More surprisingly, we find that invitations emphasizing the social nature of the discussion forum increase user activity, while invitations emphasizing other details of the discussion are less successful.” (International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2007).