The Warden

I love Mashable (I used to write for them). I love Vadim Lavrusik, one of their authors. And I really love Twitter (I’m @andrewmin). But I really have to disagree with Lavrusik’s piece on 5 Reasons Why Twitter’s Growth Cannot Be Stopped. Honestly, Twitter not only can be stopped, I believe that it most likely WILL be stopped in the near future.

Consistent growth – Not

Lavrusik argues that Twitter has always had steady growth, and will continue to do so. To illustrate this, he links to a Compete graph, which shows that Twitter grew about 20-fold in just one year. There’s almost NO negative growth, as well.

But here’s the problem. Twitter has really only hit the mainstream at the end of 2008, which is about when the Compete graph ends. Let’s look longer term, kindly provided by Alexa. Alexa shows that Twitter really starts taking off in 2009 – in 2008, growth was almost zero. A Google News timeline seems to illustrate this as well.

If you follow the Google News stories, you’ll see that most of the early stories from the mainstream are mostly articles about celebrities X Y and Z using Twitter. Additionally, Google Trends seems to indicate the first real spike followed the famed Ashton Kutcher-CNN battle. In other words, the data seems to indicate that users are added as celebrities begin using Twitter. That means there’s a limit: there’s only a certain amount of celebrity followers in the world. At a certain point, they start to overlap, as well. Additionally, most celebrities have their flunkies do all the updating, rather than post the blurb themselves. Finally, a lot of the celebrities followed are politicians. Without an election for another three years, most mainstreamers don’t really care about Fred Thompson or Dennis Kucinich. Therefore, to say that, simply because Twitter grew like crazy in eight months, Twitter will continue to grow forever.

Gaining approval from big companies – Really?

Lavrusik also argues that the big companies are using Twitter. That’s true – up to a point. Sure, tons of companies are joining Twitter. And some of them, like @zappos, do a really good job. But then there are companies like @amazon, who basically use Twitter as another outlet for their RSS feed. Just because companies “do” Twitter doesn’t mean that there are ANY advantages to visiting a Twitter feed rather than reading an RSS feed.

Twitter is the number one most social brand – Wrong

Lavrusik makes the argument that Twitter is the most popular social brand, based on this study. Wrong. Actually, Twitter is the most popular social brand mentioned most frequently on the Web during July 2009. Because of that, the study overlooks one very important alternative: Facebook. NO ONE links to Facebook. Why would you? Most of the stuff on Facebook is private anyway. On the other hand, everyone can link to Twitter because almost everything on Twitter is public. However, that in NO WAY means that Facebook isn’t more popular than Twitter. And despite this, Facebook is still #4 (beating OBAMA, for crying out loud!). The next generation is turning to Facebook, not Twitter, as the next social brand, as Matthew Robson argues.

Twitter receives millions in free media coverage – So?

Lavrusik points to an Ad Age study ($$$) saying that Twitter receives more free advertising than Bing will. So? This really goes back to my first point – people who joined because of celebrities can’t sustainably fuel a company for more than a few years.

Continued growth internationally – Unstoppable?

This is where Lavrusik and I do agree: for now, Twitter is incredibly handy for getting users in other countries to share news about oppression. But here’s the problem (or rather, the blessing in disguise for the rest of the world): these criseses don’t happen every day. You really can’t base your product’s growth on criseses, unless you’re the military. Twitter can’t tell business investors that the only reason they’re continuing to grow is because they’re used in crisis situations. It’s a great tool, but in its current form, it’s not sustainable.

Conclusion

Will Twitter continue to grow short-term? Duh. Will Twitter continue to grow long-term? Maybe, but if it does, I doubt it will be solely because of any of these reasons. Of course, the really important question: Will I continue to use Twitter? The answer: Duh, heck yeah. Whether in good times or bad, find me at @andrewmin.