“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention… By plotting the minimum retention rates for different Internet audience sizes, it is clear that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure. To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.”

The summary offered by the authors of the study is simply, “Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.” Some have related this to similar studies published about Second Life, which also enjoyed a wave of massive media hype spurring new users to register, many of whom soon quit or never visited the service again. Do or could some of these same users quit over time, rejoin under different names or accounts, or migrate to third party Twitter apps that mange their message stream on the service? Sure, but more users are sticking with mySpace and Facebook.

Much of the problem is in the hugely inflated touting of Twitter as the next AT&T or the most revolutionary development in mass communication after a century of paradigm changing advances in technology. Now Business Week quotes the Nielsen blog with an article titled: “Twitter is a Fad”.  This is further taken up by the “anti-Twitter as a philosophy” people, who can’t stand the fact that people are broadcasting their own banalities and vanities… probably most symbolized by the recent Jon Stewart attacks on the site.

I personally see Twitter as the leading force with Facebook in the development of the “Stream” – the flow of real time information, personal updates, status messages, link recommendations, friend’s messages, business updates, etc. which are bookmarked / followed based on a user’s personal choices and filtered until they become a meaningful and helpful running bulletin board of information. A user may see the Stream as a media channel similar to instant messages, blogs, websites, phone, TV, radio, or other traditional and new media sources, combining many aspects of each but emerging different. There is a leveling of the playing field similar to other digital / viral media, new possibilities of direct communication, an aspect of reality TV, social networking and chat merged with search and data mining.

It was a really big change when so many of the major media sites added “digg this” or “add to delicious” tags on nearly every one of their published pages. Social bookmarking has risen as a major trend, many start ups have vaulted to huge traffic, nice deals, and take-overs on the rise of its popularity… but those sites likely also had similar (or worse) statistics to Twitter in regards to user retention. A good point that validates the Nielsen report would be a look at social bookmarking’s statistics now, after the hype & establishment as a mainstream web publishing medium. My estimate is that massive numbers of users have quit Digg, Delicious, Mixx, and similar sites following their explosive / expansive growth, and the sector will probably average out with around 10% (or less) audience on the web collectively in the near term… what is also being projected (or debated) about Twitter.

With regard to the Stream, Facebook has an obvious advantage over Twitter. Facebook and Twitter both have increasingly open APIs allowing developers to access Stream data. Live search is trending as a very hot topic and many expect it to be the next big development in the search industry. So many mash-ups aggregating data from across so many different social networks, but few have really emerged as high traffic, popular sites. In the end, I see the “microblogging”-Tweet-Status Update format becoming more and more ubiquitous across all web channels and a “game changing” app appearing that synergizes and allows all types of filters and customizations from all the different social media sources.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Nielsen Online – Twitter User Retention 50% Less Than Facebook & mySpace

WordPress Plugins:

Xavisys, the web development company behind WebDevNews.net, has created a Twitter feed module for WordPress called WordPress Twitter Widget Pro.

Drupal Modules:
For Drupal, I find the best module to be Activity Stream.

This module will republish all of your “tweets” into your Drupal site, as well as building a stream from your Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and other social networking and bookmarking sites. Highly recommended.

Also very promising for Drupal, but still in development, is the Facebook Status module (Facebook-style Statuses).

As expected, this module replicates the Facebook “Wall” and allows users to post status messages on their user profile pages. When I tried the module previously, there were still some bugs that would have prevented its use on a live site, but huge potential here with this module and a 2.0 version is now released.

The Twitter module allows users to:

1. Associate one of more Twitter accounts with their Drupal user account
2. Have their tweets displayed in a sidebar block or on their user profile
3. Post to their own Twitter account or a site-wide Twitter account whenever they create new content

http://drupal.org/project/twitter

The Tapatio Projects seeks to build an installation profile for Drupal that “enable(s) users to leverage a drupal system as a front end to twitter.com (and other sources in the future) allowing them to use drupal as a hub for message aggregation, moderation, and dispatching.”

http://drupal.org/project/tapatio

http://drupal.org/project/tapatio_installation_profile

Stan alone CMS Software:

If you are interested in breaking out from a CMS like Drupal or WordPress and building a site that is a stand alone micro-blogging platform like Twitter, the Laconica open source software may be of interest.

For an example of a Laconica site, see: http://identi.ca/

The alternative to Laconica (but operating on the same open source micro-blogging standard) is Open Microblogger

By design, the open-source micro-blogging sites share an API to allow easy cross posting and searching of messages between sites. They also have more advanced built in SMS capabilities, something you will have to add extra modules for in Drupal & WordPress.

Whether your client is requesting Twitter integration into their home page or business site, or you have a request to build a full micro-blogging platform, one of these solutions should make a good base to build upon.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Open Source Micro-Blogging CMS Software & Twitter Integrations

Facebook was reportedly in similar talks with Twitter last year, but it looks more likely that the two companies are squaring off and developing / evolving the market for real-time, streaming updates of personal & business information in competition. Recent changes to make Facebook’s “Wall” posts more public is seen as a step in Twitter’s direction. The other players in the field are essentially minor in comparison at this point. Some are suggesting Microsoft could step in and make a bid for Twitter as well – they have already been reported to have invested in a large advertising stake in the company.

So what will this mean for Twitter’s user community and future? That is what has the bloggers active and engaged in discussing the topic. For the most part, judging by the way Google has managed YouTube after its purchase from the original developers / venture capitalists who founded the company, this would be great for Twitter and the community. Google could solve problems that haunt the site – downtime, server problems, search integration, as well as improving and advancing the service in new ways or synching it with other parts of the Google network.

Google could also solve what many see as Twitter’s main weakness – the lack of a revenue producing income stream. The offset of this would be something like Adsense monetization of the site, which may turn off users somewhat, but is so proven and ubiquitous on the web it could probably be introduced with very little difference in the overall user experience. Since the development team behind Twitter also built and sold the site “Blogger” to Google at the height of the blog hype cycle, it is really easy to see the same thing happening again.

“The Stream” appears to be as powerful of an upcoming internet meme at this point as “The Cloud”. Few people really believe that search is solved, and the rise in popularity of Facebook and Twitter has many discussing “real-time search” as the next game changer. In countries so soaked in public opinion reports, polls, and marketing statistics for feedback on politics, media, ad campaigns, products, and so on, having a way to monitor the pulse of real-time internet communications is incredibly powerful. Twitter created the flow, circulation, or traffic of that communication from nothing, empty web space, and that is what makes it so valuable.

Google’s search tools would apparently order and organize Twitter in a way that it becomes much more of an effective means of social communication. Has “Delicious” changed much and become better and more efficient since Yahoo took it over (del.icio.us)? All things considered it is probably not a big issue and most people likely never noticed it. But is it possible for a site to become more popular, attain much higher / web-leading traffic statistics, but at the same time become more boring, and less popular among the community that was active in its early days? That is the story of many sites, and could easily happen to Twitter.

Discussing the issue from afar, it is easy to minimize the difference between $250 million and $1 billion USD, or to forget what a massive amount of money that is. According to Wikipedia, “About $57 million of Twitter is owned by venture capitalists. (Evan)Williams raised about $22 million in venture capital. Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon). Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional USD 35 million.” If this is true, and venture capitalists typically target a 40:1 return on this type of start up, they may have reason to hold on to sell at closer to $2.4 billion USD.

On the other hand, Twitter is a Ruby on Rails site – a Eastern European group reported building a local language-specific clone of the site in a 48 hour code sprint. Until recently, the site was run on just a few servers held together with chicken wire and shoestrings. The concept is so simple, it could easily be integrated and offered on any other website. Will the host of competition ultimately dilute Twitter or will the other main web companies just develop their own equivalent, in-house solutions (like Orkut)? Right now the appreciating market price for Twitter is based on something other than these fundamentals – it is the Twitter brand, concept, and community, now part of global consciousness and interconnectedness (like Blogger) that is to be bought & sold.

In my opinion, the next stage of Twitter’s growth and development will be something quite different from its start up period, and is well managed globally by Google. If the founders cash out and use the capital to start up a new company like Tesla, SpaceX, 23andme, or the next, Web 3.0 version of Blogger and Twitter, it is a win-win for everybody.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

TechCrunch stirs Google-Twitter Rumor Mill