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Next Time You Hear "Twitter" or "FriendFeed" and "Mainstream" in a Sentence, Check Out This Post…

As of this writing, there are approximately 1.46 Billion internet users. The following are the best approximations of usage/traffic for several sites and technologies in order to provide some perspective when thinking about and discussing some of the sites and services that are currently making noise in the tech press. I hear and read a lot about the following sites and technologies and sometimes the claims make me scratch my head in confusion ("twitter has gone mainstream"), so I figured I'd do a little research to put some numbers together so I could more accurately separate out the hype.

These are pulled from different sources and have different methodologies, so there's not much scientific rigor to the following. That doesn't mean it isn't interesting an interesting list to peruse anyway

Email

According to a Radicati Group study from August 2008, there are about 1.3 billion email users worldwide. That makes a tad more than one in every five persons on the earth use email.

SMS

Short Message Service (SMS) is a communications protocol allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.

Google

According to Comscore, GOOG has 643,809,000 users as of May 2008, which is something like 50-75% of the internet population.

Facebook

Facebook attracted 123.9 million unique visitors in May 2008. That's a more-than-respectable 8% of the internet population.

RSS

Recently I asked the guys at Feedburner for some stats and I was shock to know that they currently have for Q1 2007 58.5 Million subscriptions to FeedBurner managed feeds and 65.6 Million for Q2 2007.

Interestingly, while there are a healthy number of users, according to a three year old study a lot of them (83%!) of them didn't know it. I'm sure that number has changed in the past three years, but it's still an interesting phenomenon.

Twitter

Twitdir reports 1,244,969 registered users.

That's a whopping 0.085% of the folks online. Is Twitter an occasionally fun service that I and my geeky acquaintances enjoy? Yes. Mainstream? It doesn't even sniff mainstream's vapor trail. If email is Mt. Everest, Twitter is the mound of mashed potatoes on your plate at Thanksgiving.

Did You Really Just Ask About FriendFeed?*

Yuval Atzmon reports his research shows 75,000 FriendFeed Users

That's a percentage so small Google wouldn't even return a regular number when I fed the numbers into its calculator. Instead returning 75 000 divided by 1 463 632 361 = 5.12423762 × 10^-5

For perspective… "Old Media"

Newspapers

More than 532 million people buy a newspaper every day, up from 486 million in 2003. Average readership is estimated to be more than 1.7 billion people each day.

Television

I can't find any good estimates, but large sporting events like the current Beijing Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are estimated to bring in 4+ BILLION viewers, so the total number is somewhere north of that.

*FriendFeed's inclusion is based on by the post "Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service?" over at Mashable. That post crystallized the question asked above. It had been gnawing at the edges of my brain for a while, with everyone talking about twitter being "mainstream" and the like, but the idea that FriendFeed could grow to be more than a niche service seemed kind of crazy to me. Following that, I started to cast about for some perspective on the matter. This post is the result.