Sunday, February 14, 2010

The Twitter Illusion

Another interesting thing I found while putting together the previous post. A Google Trends graph comparing the search volume of "twitter" and "facebook":


As seen in the upper graph, Twitter emerged in 2009. But with Facebook in the scale, Twitter is reduced to practically nothing. It's simply annahilated by the Facebook juggernaut. The one-sidedness of the comparison may be surprising, but the winner is not.

The real revelation is in the lower graph, tracking news reference volume, where Twitter and Facebook are practically neck-and-neck.

Why such a huge discrepancy between news volume and the search volume? It seems to support my theory that Twitter is just a hype machine for news sources that no one in the real world actually uses.

2 comments:

  1. Twitter is like a pensieve for the internet, which is a kind of cool thing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hm, also, it seems that the graphs also make Google and GMail seem insignificant in comparison to Facebook, which in terms of userbase reflects accurately I think.

    ReplyDelete