Twitter's demise widely over-reported

Late last year the Australian and international media was full of stories about the demise of Twitter.

Articles talked about how the service's growth had slowed - perhaps even reversed - and that there were clear signs that people were tired and looking for the next big thing.

Six months later and Twitter has released some new figures on usage which demonstrate how the service has continued to grow. Reported in Read Write Web, in the post Just the Facts: Statistics from Twitter Chirp last April, Twitter had grown to over 105 million global users, with 300,000 signing up each day.

With 600,000 searches on Twitter daily, the service receives 3 billion requests each day.

The site received roughly 180 million unique visitors each month, with 60% of tweets coming from third-party applications and 37% of Twitter users using their phones to tweet.

Given that Twitter only had around 8 million unique website visitors in March 2009, the figures don't appear to indicate a service in decline.

Now that over 500 Australian journalists and news media people (or follow the Twitter list here) and more than 200 government bodies in Australia and 49 Federal politicians (plus an unknown number of state and local elected representatives) have Twitter accounts, any Agencies who have not yet learnt to tweet are beginning to look very 20th Century.

By the way if your department has Twitter accounts that aren't on my list, please add yourself via a comment or in the Google spreadsheet.

After all what good is a Twitter account that you don't tell anyone about!