Recently I’ve been asking “is Twitter ‘mainstream’ yet?

I appreciate the subjective nature of this word, and also how much this comes down to perception as much as metrics. However, nobody would argue that Facebook aren’t mainstream, so how far behind are Twitter really?

I asked attendees of DevNest to do a quick poll to gauge opinion, and was surprised to see that the majority (at time of writing) thought Twitter is already mainstream.

My own perception is that Twitter isn’t mainstream, at least not within my wider demographic (i.e. my ‘normal’ friends). But regardless of whether there’s any real way to quantify this, certain things are clear to me and need addressing

  • Twitter’s publishing of user statistics is insufficient;
  • Third party research is largely flawed;
  • There is a bias that only users that send lots of tweets are important;
  • We need to better understand the dollar value of all twitter users.

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A gave this presentation at Twitter Developer Nest (#devnest) last night in Brighton, UK (12th Oct).

I discussed what Twitter is doing about entering the ‘mainstream’ and the implications these changes have for developers and business owners working on the platform.

I intend to break these topics down into a series of short blog posts, so check back for more. In the mean time, see below for the slides; minus my scintillating commentary.

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