Trouble @ Twitter in Fortune

The May 2, 2011 issue of Fortune Magazine features a beaten-up bird on the cover with the headline Trouble @ Twitter, complete with a baby blue bird with bandage on its beak and a little crutch under one wing. I am not sure the article by Jessi Hempel really gets to the heart of the matter. It wobbles a bit.

Just how popular is Twitter? Tracking its growth is complicated in part because many people tweet via dashboards such as TweetDeck (making it hard for Twitter to aggregate the mass viewership that many advertisers covet). The company says it has more than 200 million registered accounts (Facebook has 600 million subscribers), but users are allowed multiple accounts. The company also trumpets that the service had 155 million tweets daily by the end of the first quarter, a jump of 41% over the prior quarter, but many tweets -- news headlines, for example -- are often churned out by computers, not humans visiting Twitter.com. One key measurement of Twitter's popularity, Twitter.com's traffic, indicates a disturbing trend: ComScore shows that growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009. (Twitter disputes this, pointing to Quantcast data that show a 50% increase in worldwide traffic in the past five months.)

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You'll do better if you want to know more nitty-gritty stuff about Twitter by reading Ben Parr on Mashable. Check out his piece "Why Twitter Wants to Acquire Tweetdeck"

Also, Nova Spivak on Techcrunch has much to say about Tweetdeck as well, in "How Twitter Can Save $50 Million" here.

Photo Credit: Fortune: Ben Baker/Redux