Now what?

“Inactive” vs. “not yet active” users

There’s been some discussion lately around Twitter’s number of inactive users and what a bad sign it is for the site. Of their 175 million registered users, there over 50 million Twitter accounts following no other accounts, and almost double that for accounts with no followers (stats via lukew).

Despite their hundreds of millions of users (and continued growth), people think these inactive totals signal trouble in the Twitterverse. But unlike most other sites, an inactive user on Twitter isn’t quite the same lost cause.

For whatever reason, it takes some (most?) people a long time to get comfortable with Twitter - not only that, but that lack of comfort is sometimes labelled as annoyance.

“Twitter annoyed the hell out of me for the first year and a half.”

                                            -Mike Arrington at Startup School 2008

While people are in this annoyance phase, they naturally look for reasons that the service will die, so they don’t have to put up with it anymore. But a strange thing happens - people keep talking about the service (maybe because it’s so annoying). Other people continue to sign up, and before you know it - you start to engage with them or others.

Even though their growth has been nothing short of meteoric so far, I predict continued big things for Twitter in 2011. Those 50-100 million “not yet active” users will continue rediscovering the service and its increasing utility.