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The Twitter Plateau

Last month, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams announced that Twitter’s US growth had been slowing recently.  Today several new reports released some confirming and challenging information.

Compete.com, which monitors website traffic, had reported Twitter’s unique views, have been relatively close and haven’t changed much since June.  Of course last year at this time, the site had roughly 3.4 million unique views, and just last month saw close to 20 million more unique views.  The plateau has been a bit confusing for experts though because Twitter has been embraced by everyone from celebrities, every day people, businesses and organizations. 

Williams said at the Summit, “Our US Twitter.com growth has slowed temporarily and there are some things we will be launching that we think will pick that back up.”  Since that statement, Twitter has rolled out several new features.  First it released Twitter Lists at the end of October, which allows users to categorize friends and followers in certain categories and groups.  That has already proven to be useful for news organizations during breaking news situations.  The company also released it Beta version of a ReTweet Button this week, but has been temporarily disabled to work out a few bugs.  The button will allow users to ReTweet what another user says with just a single click of a mouse. 

The plateau really has experts scratching their heads, as Palo Alto Networks, an enterprise firewall provider, released a report stating that in the past 6 months, Twitter’s use has grown 250%.  Twitter isn’t to concerned about it’s rankings, and believes that views will start to continue to rise again soon as it aims to be the new way of communication, offering more and more SMS services world wide.