Tag Archives: numbers

by Michelle Lentz

It’s a day for numbers, I suppose. Earlier today, someone created the 1 millionth social network on Ning. Ning is the “build your own social network” site started by Marc Andreesen over two years ago. C|Net’s numbers state that “Ning has 22 million registered users, about 6.1 million of whom are considered active. Out of the million networks, about a fifth are currently active.” (I suspect people build networks as experiments, but don’t act on them.)

This makes me happy. Ning has made my life infinitely easier. I run a non-profit on the side and creating a social network on Ning was our best bet for a web site. It kept me from having to spend time coding and designing and instead, I could dive more into the content. Over the last year, our Ning site has improved because the offerings from Ning have improved as well. For my non-profit, I literally am running a mini-Facebook.

The same applies to the rather impressive Open Wine Consortium, of which I’m a member, and many of the other niche social networks on Ning. I love the way Ning allows people to gather together around a single subject. Alternatively, it also works as a basic web site for our family site – pulling in RSS feeds, photos, videos, and more. I’m debating on moving my main business web site to Ning, because the tech support is excellent and the features are better than what I could feasibly build on my own.

So congratulations to Ning – 1 million networks strong.

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Michelle Lentz

Comscore came out with new numbers yesterday and Twitter traffic in the US has grown like wildfire. In February, Comscore rated Twitter traffic at 4 million US users.

Then yesterday, they gave us this:

Unique visits to Twitter.com in the US jumped from 4 million to 9.3 million in March. That’s a growth of 131% in one month. Wow!

Nielsen and Comscore both chime in on the age ranges, concurring that ages 25-54, in general, are the tweetiest. Here’s what Nielsen has to say:

Twitterers (a.k.a. Tweeters) are not primarily teens or college students as you might expect. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. We found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the combo unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only.

It’s worth noting that these numbers are all for Twitter.com. They don’t take into account the folks using desktop applications or mobile access.

With numbers like this, brands shouldn’t be ignoring Twitter any longer. Now I suppose the question is, has Twitter hit its tipping point? What do you think?

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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net