It’s Twitter’s third birthday, and there’s been lots of chatter about Twitter’s growth lately, so I thought I’d try to find some context.
Google (officially) launched in Sept 1998
Three years later it had nearly 18mm US uniques (comscore)
Facebook launched in mid 2004
Three years later it had nearly 27mm US unique users (comscore)
Twitter launched in March 2006
Three years later it has (roughly) 8 million US uniques users (compete)
Interesting to note the velocity of growth in Twitter’s chart, it’s clearly picking up. But even with a much larger Web audience than Google had back in 1998-2001, Twitter is not yet tracking to Google’s (or Facebook’s) early growth. But if it keeps growing like this, it just may.
Also worth noting: Twitter is a distributed service, leveraging a lot of “instances” of Twitter (Tweetdeck, Twhirl, SMS users) and I have heard that nearly half of its “users” don’t even hit the main site at any given time….
I should add, the numbers are not all from the same source, Comscore’s Google numbers come from old Media Mextrix info, and I could not find any current Comscore info on Twitter on the Comscore site. If you have better numbers, leave em in comments and I’ll add to the post!