As we wrote some years ago, being a 3rd party application on someone else's platform is always uncomfortable, especially if you do what the main platform also does - like, say, providing access to Twitter's datastream. There is a relationship not akin to that of the pre-conjugalated male spider - you are useful for now, but at some point the jig-a-jig is up and you are going to get eaten.
So, news out yesterday that only about 23% of all traffic is not from native Twitter systems is no surprise.....Benjamin Mayo collected 1m tweets from a random sampling of tweets across a 9-hour period, approximately 9am to 5.30pm on the 18th July:
In order to determine how many people would be affected by a ban on third-party clients, the first step is to identify anyone using native clients. There are a handful of them: Twitter.com, m.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, iPad, Mac as well as TweetDeck and Keitai Web (Twitter’s Japanese client) and SMS (identified as “txt”). Twitter recently announced a client for Nokia S40, but I don’t think it has caught on — zero of the million tweets originated from this client.
The total of these rows is 708,101 out of 1,000,000.
Therefore, this means that at least 70.8% of the total originated from first-party clients, and at most 29.2% of people use third-party Twitter clients. Already, first-party apps clearly have a monopoly. The actual share of first-party usage is even higher, however. This is because not all of the observed apps are actually “clients”. Many are simply apps which post to Twitter. Instagram is an example of this; it just posts links back to its own service.
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I found that 36 of those [other 3rd party ] apps were not clients (identified by the third column). Applying that ratio (30.5%) to the 291,899 tweets, it is estimated that 89,053 tweets were not from clients. By discounting these ‘invalid’ tweets, the overall bucket is reduced, thereby increasing the final proportion of first-party app usage to 708,101 out of 910,947 tweets, equivalent to a percentage share of over 77%.
The best way to avoid being eaten is to be bought, as TweetDeck managed about a year ago - at the time they were reportedly about 20% of Twitter traffic. Now they are a mere c 1.9% of all Twitter traffic...a 90% decline in a year.
There is a lesson there....