Two articles just ran on TechCrunch detailing the top Twitter clients as shown on TwitStat and Compete. Many users took offense to the original omission of Twhirl on the Compete article. Many people also noted that it’s impossible for Compete to measure a client’s popularity when they don’t actually contact their home site.
Hours later, Damon Cortesi (@dacort) published his list of top 20 Twitter applications. If you recall, we’ve written about TweepSearch and have mentioned TweetStats here and on Twitter, both of which he created. Damon’s using Gnip as a firehose for Twitter updates, which gives him the ability to track Twitter clients much better than those who are using the public timeline or Compete (he tweeted that he was querying 50-60 million rows of data for this report).
Damon’s results are pretty much what you would have expected from looking at TweetStats. Here are the top 10 Twitter apps for January and how many updates they pushed:
- Web – 22.11 million (includes anything w/o a source)
- TwitterFeed – 4.51 m
- TweetDeck – 3.28 m
- txt – 2.46 m
- Twitterrific – 2.18 m
- TwitterFox – 2.00 m
- Twhirl – 1.98 m
- mobile web – 1.19 m
- Tween – 911 k
- TwitterBerry – 870 k
Other notable apps on the list are a trio of iPhone clients TwitterFon, Tweetie, and Twinkle. There was also FriendFeed and Ping.fm. Damon also notes that 1,231 different clients sent at least 1 update to Twitter in January. Check out the full report.
What's great about this report from Damon is that it really puts some statistical significance to how people are using Twitter. Though TwitterFeed and TweetDeck nabbed the second and third spots, I'm most interested by the fact that Twitter's own methods of posting still made the top 10 list (texting at #4 and mobile web at #8).
The other interesting point for me is that TwitterFeed isn't far from being overtaken by an actual Twitter client. I feel the TwitterFeed numbers are somewhat bloated as a Twitter app (though I realize they aren't), as most people are using it strictly to pipe in RSS feeds. The amount of updates coming in off of those feeds could be much more than the average user would post organically through one of the other Twitter apps.
I also feel bad that I've not heard about Tween before. After some quick research it looks like it's a Japanese-based app though, so that stings a bit less.
Reply · PermalinkSeems worth noting that approximately 40% of Twitter use comes straight from the Web. A rough estimate based on the numbers above, but an interesting statistic nonetheless.
Reply · PermalinkThe 'web' category is misleading because any client that doesn't report a source gets logged as web. We've heard that the API sees way more usage than the web client does.
Reply · PermalinkI'm new to the Twitter thing (thanks to DMJuice and my wife)... But it is interesting if Twitter's intention was for txt and mobile web usage, but yet the great majority of users are sitting smack dab in front of their computers tweeting away. They're missing the point, get out and live life! (as I write this from smack dab in front of my computer).
Reply · PermalinkWhat is more interesting in my book is TweetDeck has received funding and only ranks 3rd for a service that has a relatively small user base. I wonder what investors are looking for when they invest into an app.
Reply · PermalinkI'd say give them a bit of time. TweetDeck only recently received funds a few weeks ago. Plus, in relation to all other third-party apps, it is sending the most amount of updates, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I'd assume that the investors putting money into TweetDeck had seen some sort of similar chart, but maybe not. I also think it would be interesting to hear about what they're looking for when it comes to an application like this that lives off of another service.
Reply · Permalink