Twitter milestone - 2 billion tweets in one month

I understand Twitter. Twitter is not chat or IM. Twitter is not a replacement for email. And Twitter is not the end of SMS.

For the month of May 2010, Twitter officially had 2 billion tweets per month. According to Pingdom ...

Back in December 2009, the number of tweets per month on Twitter reached 1 billion for the first time. Now in May, we reached yet another milestone: 2 billion tweets per month (or to be precise, 1.99 billion, which is close enough).

Ezra Gottheil said “... that’s promising for Twitter”, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “Fads tend to accelerate upward and come crashing down. It looks like people are finding real uses for Twitter… I don’t have the data, but I think there’s been a shift in usage.”

The percentage of Twitter accounts currently tweeting with any regularity is approximately 17%. That’s a really low number. But Gottheil perhaps describes this as: “You can have a lot of people trying Twitter and lose most of them but still increase both the number of users and the level of use.” 

Pingdoms describes the 2 billion tweets as ... “Maybe Twitter won’t quite be able to reach the almost 6 billion tweets per month we’ve predicted for the end of the year, but it’s clear that the Twitter platform is still growing at a healthy pace. Close to doubling the volume of monthly tweets in the last six months is no small feat.”

Twitter is still innovating - a partner ad platform and usability enhancements - my prediction (June 2010) is that Twitter will be acquired and morphed into a new Social Media platform in the next 2 years. But now it continues to grow at a fast pace.

Twitter is has gained critical mass and is going to disappear anytime soon. According to Twitterholic, Britney Spears, Ashton Kucher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga and Barack Obama make up the top 5 most followed people in the world using twitter. These 5 people have more than 20 million people following them. Maybe Twitter will morph into something else in a few years. But this is the internet – that’s practically a given. In the meantime, I am happy to tweet every whimsical thought I have.

Nokia and Yahoo team up against Google

It has been said that Nokia and Yahoo make perfect mobile partners. Countering Google and fast track the Nokia's move into web services. The two companies are expected to get closer this week, with Yahoo holding a press conference today hosted by CEO Carol Bartz. This will showcase "an exciting announcement about providing global consumers with rich online and mobile experiences, and bringing forward a new era in keeping consumers connected."

According to sources, this will be a partnership with Nokia, somewhat on the lines of Yahoo's recently extended alliance with Samsung to bring a host of mobile services to the Korean giant's phones, spanning various operating systems. In Nokia's case, the collaboration is called 'Project Nike' (after the Greek goddess of victory, not the sportswear firm) and will bring Yahoo search, email and applications to Nokia Symbian and MeeGo devices. This will see these apps preloaded on various Nokia products, and even a fully Yahoo themed handset, somewhat like Nokia's lower profile Skype and Facebook gadgets.

The opportunity to team up against Google is obvious. Yahoo is becoming intimate with the companies who control almost 60% of the world's handsets (even on Samsung's Android range, Galaxy). There is a conflict of interest between Nokia and Yahoo - in particular, Nokia wants to build up its own software brand Ovi, even while it also needs to have big name services on its phones, and become a serious mobile application player quickly. These dilemmas explain why sources say the two firms have been in on-off talks for years.
As for Samsung, the Korean firm will preload branded Yahoo apps including Mail, Messenger, Front Page, Search, Flickr and News, expanding a three-year old agreement.