CAUTION: unfiltered rant...

Another day, another thrilling piece of navel-gazing by the tech industry. This time from the mighty TechCrunch who give us Blogging Vs. Microblogging: Twitter’s Global Growth Flattens, While WordPress’ Picks Up. Good to see they're picking up some tips from political journalism - stuff the analysis, it's a horserace!

The article ticks at least one of the boxes in the Heaths' classic Made To Stick about what makes stories memorable: it is 'unexpected'. All year it's been "Twitter Twitter Twitter" and "blogging is dead". But what's this? Mercy me! Twitter's "flattening off" and Wordpress is "picking up". Look, they've discreetly annotated the graph to help you out:

My problem (apart from possibly terminal sarcasm) is that, as almost anyone who uses Twitter knows, a lot of people use apps to tweet and may never visit the website at all. A *lot* of people. A random trawl through my stream shows up half a dozen different apps used in the sapce of a few minutes.

Actual research on this seems scarce. However, this effort from Sysomos has the web as by far and away the most common means of tweeting, used by 46%. However, that still means the majority of users *don't* use the website.

[Disclaimer: I have no reason to distrust these raw figures, however some dubious analysis elsewhere in the report dosen't fill me with confidence.]

If this is the case then what is the point in comparing Twitter website visits with Wordpress? Website drop-off could quite easily be offset by increased app usage, a not unreasonable hypothesis. *You are simply not comparing like with like.*

I have no way of knowing what Twitter's trends are overall. They may well be flattening off after this year's insane growth. I'm no expert. What I do know is that there are a *lot* more interesting topics that could do with some serious analysis right now rather than a perpetual horserace propped up by dubious evidence.