Is Twitter doomed to a similar lifespan as other platforms like 2^nd life? Twitter made an impressive growth in a very short time, but if you dig a bit deeper, you will see that it’s maybe a big balloon that could explode very soon.

As where Facebook has a steady increase in unique visitors (+8,54% in April) and Youtube an double digit increase in videos viewed (+15% in April, but a minor decline in unique visitors), Twitter seems to have stopped growing (a small increase of 1,47% in visitors). (Source: Compete)

Some questions may rise, especially if you add to this some other figures from Huspot:

• 79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
• 68.68% have not specified a location
• 55.50% are not following anyone
• 54.88% have never tweeted
• 52.71% have no followers

Or other figures from a Harvard study that say:

• 90% of the tweets come from 10% of the users (compared to 30% by 10% of users on other Social Media)
• More than half of the people update their profile less than once every 74 days

Nielsen found out that 60% of the US Twitter users failed to come back the next month.

Some interesting quotes:

The Harvard data says: “very, very few people tweet” and the Nielsen data says: “very, very few people listen consistently”

“Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends” or “people give the service a try, but rarely or never return.”

My thoughts are that, for the moment, I personally don’t see any real use for Twitter, that can’t be covered by anything else that is already available.

• My friends; I’m connected to Facebook with them and I know what they’re doing.
• Interesting articles; I have a s***load of RSS feeds that I consult on a very regular basis, my mind can’t cope with more I’m afraid
• Search: I don’t need information that urgently that I need real time search. A generic search engine does the job for me

The thing is that we EU people tend to wait for some more rules and organization before adopting something that works in the US. For the moment Twitter is still a bit the Far West, filled with spammers, people who want to make easy and quick money via affiliate links, or small entrepreneurs that think they are experts, but don’t have more followers than the Pope and make their profile run automatically with autofollows and automated direct messages. I don’t seem to get the objective … have as much followers as possible, but do you really think all those followers are ready your updates? We will see …

Sources: BBC, Marketingpilgrim, Mashable