Internet Globalization News

The World Is Flat For Twitter: User Growth Slowing Down

After growing exponentially from 10 to 20 million users in a couple of months, and doubling again to 40 million in just three months, it's got almost six months for Twitter to reach 60 millions users worldwide.

This slow down can be explained by many factors, most of them intertwined. In my opinion, the size of the "early adopters" audience around the world is one of them. Once the early adopters have been using the service for a while, and with all the main media starting to use it (as it's already happening), other users ("followers") will adopt Twitter -- maybe at a slower rate, but still in a positive trend.

via www.techcrunch.com

Twitter’s international traffic continues to flatten as the microblogging site’s number of unique visitors flattened in November. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. Though the site saw a rise of 2 million visits globally, this slight uptick in visitors only represents a 3.5 percent increase in traffic. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic has stalled as well; U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.

Twitter Growth: Total Unique Visitors (in Thousands)

Smart and Reliable: Skype Accounts For 12% Of All International Calls

The increase in usage of Skype to make phone calls (not just Skype-to-Skype, but from Skype to land lines and cell phones) has been impressive, and I can think of some reasons for this phenomenon:

- Pricing: Skype competes with great per-minute fees everywhere. The local competition does not come from local phone companies (all of them with higher prices than Skype), but from calling-card ones: in countries like Spain, calling-card fees are comparable to the ones offered by Skype, and there is no need for a computer (or an expensive smart-phone) to place the calls.

- Globalization and Localization: Skype can be downloaded and used almost everywhere in the World. They have also made a great job localizing the software, and making it a success in non English speaking countries.

- Product: Skype is easy to use, provides a reliable service, and solves a real need of customers.

via www.techcrunch.com

VoIP services juggernaut Skype has seen its share of international calling minutes jump to 12% in 2009, a 50% increase compared to the year before. And as you can tell from the pie chart below, 54 billion minutes out of 406 billion in total were accumulated by users calling each other Skype-to-Skype last year.

International Calls (in minutes) and Share of Skype (12% of total)