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At current growth rates everyone in the world will have a Twitter account by December 21 2009!

Ross Dawson, April 24, 2009 4:08 PM US PT

ComScore has just released global Twitter usage figures for March, showing a 95% growth in the month to 19.1 million visitors.

Using the same methodology as my At current growth rates everyone in the US will have a Twitter account by August 22 2009! blog post from last week (extrapolating current exponential growth rates)...

Everyone in the world will have a Twitter account by December 21 2009! (which will be a nice Christmas present for the Twitter founders)

US users currently comprise 48.6% of global visitors. It's interesting that US growth is 131% compared to global growth at 95%. If these growth rates continue the US will again have the majority of global users, after having started as a mainly US application and then gained significant traction internationally. Undoubtedly by later this year global growth rates will pick up relative to the US (especially since everyone in the US will be on Twitter by August 22!)

2 Comments

Quentin said:

Having been an online consultant now for the past 10 years we see these appps come and go. Huge growth also means huge headaches and I noticed in the news that Twitter is stumbling in being able to handle the huge bandwidth costs and many virus attacks.
Maybe they were going for the big buyout like youtube but I guess time will tell. I see that Google video is in the same trouble however I think their model can sustain the cost.

April 25, 2009 7:14 AM

Ross Dawson said:

Thanks Quentin. This is of course a very tongue-in-cheek analysis. While Twitter could very well be transcended by something else very quickly, these still are pretty spectacular growth rates, and it is absolutely transformative in that whatever succeeds it will build on the changing way people approach personal communication.

The scalability factor is critical. After initial problems the Twitter platform has done reasonably well (though the API has been a bit dodgy). The current development of more scalable web technologies is going to critical in enabling staggering growth rates for Twitter and whatever comes next...

April 25, 2009 5:48 PM

Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-up Repyoot.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.