The most recent numbers from Nielsen indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US by the end of Feb, 2009. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in the month of January, Twitter.com clocked 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month. But can that Growth be sustained?
It is hard to imagine that any technology could sustain that kind of growth. But what is even more surprising and potentially derailing for Twitters growth, is the lack of Twitter adoption in the teen market.
An interesting statistic to keep in mind - Over 70% of new and innovative consumer technologies are first adopted by the teen market (world wide). So outright rejection of the technology can’t be good for Twitter long term. But there are other factors that will certainly weigh in on the future success of Twitter, such as what and how they decide to go about putting a business model around such a rapidly adopting web application, or how Facebook chooses to further integrate social functionality across their platform. After all, Twitter has only copied and popularized the FB "What Are You Doing Now?" widget.
Twitter is definitely the shiny new object in town and stars like Oprah and Aston Kutcher are racing to build followings. Perhaps the adoption of mainstream celebs will help Twitter adoption at the teen level but that has yet to be seen. In fact Aston Kutcher threatened to stop twittering recently because of an apparent stalking attempt, which could have an adverse effect on the popular technology.
Without a strong foothold in the teen market Twitter’s growth may hit an air pocket and if the teen market doesn’t latch on, that could spell a quick descent for the current King of the Web Widgets. It's very likely that the teen market will need to be convinced of the value of twitter over SMS or Facebook updates. This, coupled with the fact that Twitter has no formal revenue stream in its business model, it will be diffucult to sustain support both from a technical and cost standpoint.
You know, as much as I agree with you on twitter's lack of ability to grab hold of the teen demographic, I think a lot of the growth has come from those within companies wishing to expand their networking capabilities. Companies are certainily capitalizing on twitter to allow them to market themselves in a fresh way. The media blitz has definitely helped Twitter to grow as fast as it has, and I think the site has a lot of dedicated, prolific users, which I'm not sure is a bad thing. The online audience is very fickle, so I think Twitter needs to find a way to maintain loyal users, and, as you said, really try to move forward with developing a business model/ad revenue model. Twitter apps have already done so.
Twitter would be fantastic as a PR firm.