Twitter founder hits back a falling traffic talk

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has hit back at claims yesterday that its usage is falling in a tweet that said that traffic on the microblogging service was bigger than ever.

Yesterday, Mashable blogged that Twitter’s traffic was close to flatlining in the US and provided a bunch of figures that appeared to indicate this might be so.

In response to that Twitter’s Williams tweeted that “across all metrics that matter, yesterday was Twitter’s highest-usage day ever. (And today will be bigger)”.

That seems to confirm what most of us thought anyway and what I blogged yesterday. Yes, the rush of people trialling Twitter after the media frenzy has faded, but those who are around are using it more and more and on different platforms.

New people will still sign up and become long time users of the service as the fact remains that it does a lot of stuff really really well and I’m just going to quote Clay Shirky again here:

“Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since email. It will be hard to wait out Twitter because it is lightweight, endlessly useful and gets better as more people use it. Brands are using it, institutions are using it, and it is becoming a place where a lot of important conversations are being held.”

What’s interesting is that Twitter had a really good day yesterday and nothing much happened yesterday. Seriously, I was there for almost of it and literally nothing of note took place. There was no new snow to talk about and not even Alastair Campbell talking about Iraq or Sarah Palin joining Fox (I hear they’re getting Forest Gump as well. Awesome) got people that excited.

What I mean is that it was a business as normal day and still Twitter’s founder is telling us that (to repeat) across all metrics that matter Twitter was having a great day.

That strikes me as significant. More significant that he predicts another strong day and this was before (I’m guessing) the earthquake in Haiti took place about which Evans tweeted this: “I wonder what % of people tweeting to text a donation to Haiti have done so themselves. That’s not meant to be cynicism, just curiosity.”

Out of all of this and as media organisations increase their use (integrate it like Sky News on all news desks) ever more traffic will push upwards. Not to massive levels it previously witnessed and not to the level of Facebook, but bigger and no doubt better.

The good news is for Stephen Fry at least is that Evan Williams did not come out and blame him. Phew.

[Twitter]