And the most popular Twitter app is…
Discussing the Twitter-app-developer-fiasco a couple of weeks ago on John Gruber’s “Talk Show”, I mentioned how we were missing a key set of data: What apps do people use to tweet most often? Benjamin Mayo did the legwork, analyzing 1 million tweets to see which clients were most popular to create tweets.
The winner — by far, as in the past — was Twitter’s website, representing about 25% of tweets. Twitter’s official apps for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry were the only other apps representing more than 10% of the tweets. Everything else was sub-5%, including Ubersocial for BlackBerry, the top “unofficial” client. (Tweetbot, the app that’s currently popular with the Mac-nerd set, sent less than 1%.)
Now, some disclaimers: These tweets were from a short span on one day. A larger and more diverse sample set would be better, representing different days of the week and times of day. And note that this only tells us where people are sending tweets, not reading them — and the reading is what Twitter increasingly cares about as it adds features and advertising to the Twitter experience.
But: Interesting, and evidence that Twitter’s consolidation of Twitter clients is working. Unofficial apps represented 42% of tweets analyzed in a March 2011 study, while Mayo’s analysis puts them at less than 30%. TweetDeck has since changed sides after being acquired by Twitter last May, and seems to be relatively less than half as popular now than before. And Twitter for Android and iPhone seem to be growing like crazy.
Check out my new site: The New Consumer, a publication about how and why people spend their time and money.