Measuring App Popularity – Difficulties
Thursday, February 12th, 2009Yesterday I gave some qualitative reasons to supplement quantitative numbers by Hitwise to suggest that Plurk has had more traffic than Twitter in Singapore since July, 2008.
One thing that I’m wondering, from what I’m gathering from the data, is how the visits are measured. Plurk is automatically updated, Twitter isn’t. Twitter can also be accessed from desktop applications like Twhirl, Tweetdeck and many others. Are these factored in? How about mobile apps for Twitter like Twinkle and Twitterific? Similarly, how about mobile access for Plurk? The Plurk app for iPhones and iPod Touches?
In other words, are there “hidden” traffic sources that we should be looking at?
Secondly, looking at Prof. Michael’s blog post that points to Hubspot releasing a report that lists Singapore as one of the top 30 Twitter cities worldwide, I’m wondering this: If Plurk has more traffic in Singapore than Twitter, and Twitter is in the top 30 Twitter cities, what does that say about any city that is not in the top 30? Are they by default, even less than Singapore’s Plurk traffic?
What are the implications of these statistics on people looking to use microblogging as a communications tool? Is it far from being mainstream if a top 30 city is a small one like Singapore?
Granted, neither of these data points are concrete and conclusive. The Hubspot data uses about 500,000 Twitter users as a sample size. This seems to be the problem most of us are dealing with. It’s not a complete lack of information, but imperfect information. Should we just take what is available and work from there because it’s better than nothing? What are the alternatives? Would love to hear from those struggling to answer these questions just as much as I am.
Tags: hitwise, hubspot, microblogging, microblogging mainstream, plurk traffic, Singapore, tweetdeck, twhiel, twinkle, twitter cities, twitter traffic, twitterific
