The new piece of information is surely going to excite the Twitter management, specially to company’s Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo who is going to address several news conferences and seminars in coming days – Twitter has managed to cross over MySpace, one time highly appreciated social networking web portal, in terms of monthly unique visitors last month.
According to latest report released by online research firm ComScore Inc, four-year-old-micro blogging website Twitter.com has become No3 social networking-type service provider in the world after surpassing MySpace in Unique Visitors figures. While the difference is marginal, Twitter shows promising growth in coming months.
In August, Twitter reserved 96 million unique visitors against MySpace which stands with 95 million visitors in the same month. However, Twitter manages to grow 76% compare to drop of 17% of MySpace from the same period last year.
Furthermore Twitter’s growth is going to be exponential, as expected by company, after the launch of new design at www.twitter.com which has been launched two weeks ago. New design seems to follow Facebook and could draw in users two uses the services through third party tools like TweetDeck.
However, both Twitter and MySpace are dwarfed by Facebook, which grew by 54% to 598 million unique visitors in August, and Microsoft’s Windows Live Profile, which integrates with the company’s web-based email and other services and had more than 140 million visitors.
At the other hand Microsoft is also not giving up its place so easily. Constantly company is putting efforts for retaining its share, atleast, of Windows Live. Currently Windows Live Profile has been growing at a pace of about 10% per year. For the past year Google’s Orkut service has remained flat, at about 55 million visitors, with most users being located in India and Brazil.
Why MySpace lagged behind
The growth of Twitter is not a magical night move. Constant loss of users, failure to add new features and getting the visitors pulse wrong were few major reasons which pulled MySpace down.
However, there is no direct comparison between Twitter and MySpace as both the companies serves different set of functionality to similar user base. While MySpace offers feature like music sharing, chatting, photo sharing and self personal networking Twitter is more focused on instant messaging distribution and forced networking (followers) concept.
Another main reason behind Twitter’s success is language functionality. While Twitter is a multilingual service, MySpace is still available in only 15 languages which make the adoption of MySpace services restricted to geographies. Twitter is much simpler in terms of usage through mobile than MySpace. While MySpace offers only networking services, Twitter take advantage of networking as well as micro-blogging service offerings.
Some of the analysts credit Facebook for such steep decline in MySpace’s popularity. Since Twitter also got launched almost the same time with Facebook, it’s enjoying indirect benefits from the enormous growth of Facebook. Facebook blew past MySpace back in early 2008 to take the top spot globally, according to ComScore data
The seven-year-old MySpace, meanwhile, is trying to cast itself as the place to try out new music and entertainment, and a platform for musicians to interact with fans. It also is working on overhauling its home page.
“Any comparisons between MySpace and other Internet services are irrelevant as MySpace’s mix of offerings is uniquely different and specifically focused on audiences under the age of 35,” said Rosabel Tao, a MySpace spokeswoman, in a statement. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.)
Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman said in a statement: “While we generally don’t comment on third-party statistics, the growth measured by others doesn’t surprise us. We’re seeing 370,000 new accounts a day.”
With such passionate comments, it would be interesting to see the future of Social Networking portals specially when Twitter will compete with Facebook (we hope so one day ).
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