Posts tagged hits
When Does 500 Million Equal A Lot Less Than 500 Million? When Twitter Hits Its Next Milestone
Jan 19th
Much is being made out of projections by Twitter tracking service Twopcharts’s projections that Twitter will activate its 500 millionth account next month, but a closer look at the microblogging service’s growth shows anything but a steady rise.
Twitter passed the 200 million mark last February and then, on May 18, it reached 300 million accounts. That’s 50 percent growth in roughly 90 days and the milestone gave Twitter stock as one of the Big Two (at the time) social networks.
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But something happened on the way to 400 million accounts. It would be 162 days before Twitter reached the 400 million account mark on Oct. 28. Depending on what day in February Twitter reaches 500 million users, it will have taken the company 95 to 124 days to add 100 million users: better than the climb from 300 million to 400 million, but still not as fast as growth 200 million to 300 million.
Milestones like this tend to be arbitrary, but they’re especially so in Twitter’s case. The company only counts accounts that have been opened and does not factor in accounts that have been closed by Twitter or the user. By Twopchart’s estimates, about 12% of all Twitter accounts ever opened have been closed, meaning that by the time the 500 million number is reached, there may only be about 440 million existing Twitter accounts.
Facebook is expected to surpass a billion users in August, which is all the more staggering because of the company’s strict policy requiring people to register under their real names. Twitter, on the other hand, lets users open multiple accounts, and even spoof accounts or accounts for services.
There are other layers of complexity in figuring out Twitter’s reach: by its own estimates, the service has 100 million “active” users, but it’s safe to say the majority of accounts are inactive or rarely used. Twopchart has an interesting blog post full of data, including an analysis of what has happened to the 400 millionth account.
@AdenMo has tweeted just once since becoming the account number 400 million, has just three followers and is only following one account. That’s a fairly typical account, based on Twostory’s analysis and their estimate that only about 20% to 25% of new Twitter accounts convert into active Twitter accounts.
“The vast majority of new accounts only has a limited amount of followers and following, and based on the amount of tweets sent, and the submission date of last tweets, probably only a maximum of 20%-25% convert to active new twitter users, with only about 10% accounts that actively send tweets,” Twopchart said in the blog post.
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Grails 2.0 Hits the Tracks
Dec 19th
Just in time for the holidays, the Grails team has released Grails 2.0 after almost a year in development. If you’re new to Grails, now might be a good time to check it out.
Grails is a Web application framework inspired by Ruby on Rails, but it uses Groovy instead of Ruby. Grails is also extensible, and has a pretty hefty ecosystem of plugins that add functionality.
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New in 2.0
As befits a year of development, the 2.0 release has a lot of improvements and updates. First and foremost, there’s Groovy 1.8, which has its own list of updates and improvements. It also has support for binary plugins with this release, which makes it easier for companies to ship proprietary plugins to Grails. (Whether this is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise to the reader.)
The user experience has been updated significantly with 2.0, including a new errors view that should make it easier to see where errors are in your code. 2.0 also has improvements for unit testing and a database migration plugin for helping ease the transition from testing to production.
If you want to try out Grails without setting it up yourself, check out Cloud Foundry, Grails 2.0 is already available. Grails 2.0 also comes with plugins ready for MongoDB, Redis and Riak 1.0 releases (though they’re all in release candidate/milestone phase right now). The SpringSource folks also note that Grails will be making “more exciting announcements” around Neo4j, Amazon SimpleDB and Cassandra in 2012. I can’t attest to how exciting they’ll be, but I’m sure that some folks will find it very useful.
You don’t seem to hear as much about Grails as some other frameworks, though that might just be a perception issue on my part. If you’re using Grails, let us know what you think about the 2.0 release in the comments.
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Yahoo Hits $610 Million Jackpot in Lottery Scam Case
Dec 10th
Yahoo has claimed victory in a $610 million lawsuit against a group of individuals it accused of operating a massive spam and fraud campaign.
A U.S. district court in New York issued a ruling in favor of the company, ordering the defendants to p…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Android Market Hits 10 Billion Downloads, Celebrates With 10 Apps for 10 Cents
Dec 6th
The Android Market has hit 10 billion downloads and to celebrate Google is making apps available for a dime. The Market’s editors have chosen 10 apps to put on sale for $0.10 and several of them have graced ReadWriteWeb’s mobile apps of the month columns in 2011.
There is something appealing about a discounted app made available for cheap or for free. Amazon does it every day in its Appstore and downloads of paid apps available for free tend to skyrocket more than a if the app was available for free anyway. Everybody loves a deal. Check out the list of 10-cent apps below.
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SoundHound – Most people have heard of Shazam. Well, SoundHound is like Shazam, but better. This app can recognize a song if you are singing or humming it yourself. It can do live lyrics of songs, has music videos and preview songs. It is accurate enough that it is almost creepy.
Asphalt 6: Adrenaline HD — You know those cool racing games you always see in TV commercials for smartphones? This is one of them. Cool cars, local multiplayer, Aston Martins. Not a bad choice for a dime.
Minecraft Pocket Edition — The popular series comes to Android. Minecraft is kind of like building blocks for the Millenial Generation. It was available for $7, a price that many found to be too much for a mobile version of a PC game that is nowhere near the same experience. Yet, Minecraft for less than a dollar seems pretty intriguing.
SwiftKey X Keyboard — This app barely missed being one of our top mobile products of 2011. SwiftKey X knows what you are trying to type, even if your sausages for fingers cannot get it right on your little mobile keyboard. It predicts words you are trying to type with great accuracy and auto-corrects what you may have gotten wrong.
Endomondo Sports Tracker Pro — Everybody knows about RunKeeper, but not many know of Endomondo. The sports tracker operates in much the same way as RunKeeper with real-time tracking and timing of your exercise, be it jogging or riding a bike. Keep track of calories burnt and set goals for yourself.
Great Little War Game — GLWG reminds me of playing Final Fantasy Tactics mixed with Army Men … on Android. The title is perfect too and perhaps the biggest stroke of genius for this app. It really is a great little war game. Isn’t it great when things are aptly named?
SktechBook Mobile — To be honest, this was the only app on this list that had been downloaded to my Android devices before the 10 billion promotion sale. More or less, SketchBook is the most powerful and useful photo editor available on Android.
Fieldrunners HD — Tower defense games are all the rage on mobile devices these days and Fieldrunners rates high on degree of difficulty. It compares well to other tower defense games for Android, including Tower Raiders and Dungeon Defender, which is also available in the Amazon Appstore. Fieldrunners HD distinguishes itself with top of the line graphics and a wide variety of weapons to choose from.
Color & Draw For Kids — With a couple of war-like games included in Google’s list, it is refreshing to see and educational technology app added to the list. Color & Draw is like a coloring book in your pocket. Standing in line with the kids at the bank. Let them doing a little drawing on your Android device while you wait.
Paper Camera — Imagine you are an Android developer with the heart of a six-year old and you wanted a cool camera app. That is what Paper Camera is like, an innovative camera app that has the type of user interface only a child (or those young at heart) can love.
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Search Hits Big Time, Top Engines Buying Supportive Studies
Nov 7th
It’s official: the search engine industry is playing at the big table. In the past year both Bing and Google have given financial support to researchers who have produced studies claiming they were “less biased” than the other when it comes to plu…
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Google Lobbying Spend Hits New High
Oct 26th
Google is spending more money on lobbying than ever before, as legal woes continue to plague the search giant.
By September 30, Google had already spent $5.9 million on lobbying. For all of 2010, Google spent $5.6 million on lobbying. This quart…
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Android Market Hits 500,000 Successful Published Apps, Has 37% Removal Rate
Oct 22nd
In terms of pure volume, the Android Market is rapidly catching up with the Apple App Store. Android has also been a step behind Apple. The iPhone was released in 2007, Android made its mass market debut in 2008. Apple just released iOS 5 while Android just put out version 4.0. From the application perspective, Apple has long maintained a large lead.
Mobile research firm Research2Guidance said in August that the Android Market would catch the App Store by the end of 2011. Today it released its September 2011 numbers to show that the Market has achieved half a million successful app submissions, compared to near 600,000 for Apple. Yet, even though an app has been published, that does not mean it stays in the store forever. Apple still has the advantage in application churn rate over Android.
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As of the end of the third quarter 2011, the Android Market had 319,161 active applications as compared to 459,589 for the Apple App Store. The churn rate, or applications that have been removed from an app store, was significantly higher for Android at 37% as compared to 24% for the App Store. Research2Guidance added the Windows Phone Marketplace into its study, showing a 13% churn rate.
Over 78% of the apps removed from the Android Market were free, which Research2Guidance believes is a product of the open ecosystem of the market where Android publishers have more apps in the market for testing, demos, trials and malware.
Apps die. It is a reality of the nature of development and lifecycles. There are a variety of reasons for this. Many times it is because an app does not support new versions of the operating system it is built on. For instance, there will likely be a large churn rate for older Android applications that do not end up supporting Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The same goes for developers who have not taken the time to update their apps for functionality to iOS 5.
Apps are also removed because the code degenerates and are not updated to fix bugs. Or, instead of updating a version of an app, publishers will just publish the next version as its own app and disregard maintenance for the older version. For the Android Market, malware is also a factor in removal that, as we have seen, has not been a problem on iOS.
Research2Guidance notes that the Windows Phone Marketplace is on a similar trajectory to Android in terms of removal rates. After 15 months, the 13% churn is comparable to Android at 14% after the same period of time. The firm notes that the cleanup of the Android Market did not come until well after that, near the end of 2010.
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As Twitter Hits New Milestone, CEO Talks Google, Search, Apple, IPO, Privacy
Oct 19th
Speaking with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo touched on a number of recent developments for the social media giant, dispelling a few rumors as he went. Twitter is now hosting 250 million tweets per d…
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The Guardian iPad Edition Hits iOS 5 Newsstands
Oct 12th
Just in time to hit the new iOS 5 Newsstand, The Guardian has launched a swanky new iPad edition. The app delivers content mirroring The Guardian‘s Monday through Saturday papers, but the design is all digital. Pages swing smoothly between portrait and landscape modes, the ads are interactive, and photos and videos abound.
The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.
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Read All About It
The app comes in through the Newsstand feature of iOS 5. All its text and photo content are available offline, and related stories open in a browser view. Readers can swipe back and forth between stories instead of having to tap around through menus. The app offers story sharing through Facebook, Twitter and email.
“The Guardian iPad edition is a new, fresh and appealing form of our newspaper content,” says editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. “The single daily download and the hierarchy of articles will suit people who love the Guardian’s newspaper content. To that we’ve added a selection of relevant web articles.”
Rusbridger says the app reflects the organization’s digital-first strategy. That’s a curious remark, considering that this iPad edition mirrors the print paper, but we’ll let that one slide, because this app is a first-rate tablet experience.
The Guardian has also offered a free photo gallery app for iPad called Eyewitness, which launched in February.
The Guardian’s Moves Across The Pond
Though this app centers around the U.K. edition of the paper, it has plenty to offer international readers. The Guardian has made it clear that it has international ambitions as a news organization, too. In September, it announced the launch of a U.S. homepage and declared that it was hiring U.S. journalists. It also offers a free U.S. version of its iPhone app.
As we reported yesterday, new studies show that tablet owners love consuming news on these new devices. The Guardian’s new app is an excellent example of all the qualities highlighted by consumers in that study.
Take the Guardian iPad Edition for a spin and let us know what you think!
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Google+ Hits 50 Million Users, Adds Circle Sharing
Sep 28th
Many brands have been impatiently waiting for Google to unveil Google+ business profiles. Now there’s more news that should make marketers even more eager: Google’s social network has hit an estimated 50 million users, partially thanks …
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