Because just understanding what's going on in the blogosphere doesn't tell the whole social media story anymore, HubSpot released its first State of the Twittersphere report today.
Based on data gathered through the Twitter Grader service, HubSpot looked at the behaviors and habits of roughly 600,000 users to draw some baseline conclusions about how Twitter is evolving as a social platform and (more importantly) community of people.
HubSpot's State of the Twittersphere portrays a growing platform that is attaining some scale -- HubSpot reports that the Twitter community numbers between 4 million and 5 million members (based on public estimates) and grows by as many as 10,000 new accounts each day. Yet, HubSpot also found that -- perhaps because of this rapid growth -- a large number of accounts represent new users or inactive (or lightly active) members. Not to draw too many parallels, but stats like these make me think of Second Life in early 2007, when press attention and word of mouth drove lots of new sign-ups from curious looky-loos that didn't necessarily stick.
That said, Twitter has still seen a 600% growth in traffic over the past year (Compete.com), cracked Alexa's top 1000 web sites in May 2008, and -- if the use of Twitter by Barack Obama and CNN, not to mention a growing number of major corporations, are any indicator -- does appear to be mainstreaming. HubSpot promises quarterly updates -- and it will be interesting to see how the numbers trend over the coming year.
Check out the HubSpot blog for a few more soundbites and some nifty charts and, for the full scoop, grab your free copy of the report.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3d2c46cd-9095-4e37-8fac-bef12ad8e73d)
