MattSnodBlog

Within the piles of confidential documents released to TechCrunch this past summer about Twitter, one particular tidbit caught my eye. They were predicting to have 1 billion users by the end of 2013. This struck me as odd, since only around 1.6 billion people in the world have access to the Internet. Even Google, by far the most trafficked Web site in the world, has a mere 150 million visitors a month (mere?).

Mind you, this could be a lofty prediction from a start-up looking for more money, but let's take a look at the trend. Over this summer, traffic to Twitter has been leveling off. One could chalk this up to fewer audiences during summer months, but that typically only affects the television industry. In fact, online video viewing is actually up this summer.

So I figured I'd get more scientific with this, and plug Twitter's traffic numbers into Excel to run some predictions. When forecasting a trend growth, based on the 12 months ending August 2009, Twitter wouldn't reach 1 billion users until November 2043. And running a simple linear growth forecast, they wouldn't reach a billion until May of 2047.

While I don't think Twitter will go the way of SecondLife, I think its adoption rate will level off at around 75 million next year. Despite how utterly simple it is from a technological point of view, there are still a lot of people who don't "get it."