Chatroulette's de-veiling and Twitter's depreciation

15/03/10 posted by Annie

The world-sweeping web craze of Chatroulette sees roughly one million new visitors every day, each behind a comforting veil of anonymity which the site promises. However Chatroulette Map, a new hybrid site between Chatroulette and Google Maps, grabs screenshots of users and plots their actual map location using their IP address, which is revealed through the peer-to-peer nature of the webcam connection. Privacy advocates have criticised Chatroulette Map, however it's creators say they will remove an image and marker on request. With the risky dose of graphic material you might find on Chatroulette, having your whereabouts posted to strangers is another thing all together. Andrey Ternovsky, 17 year old creator of Chatroulette, says a level of anonymity is taken away by Chatroulette Map, and he plans to add something to his site allowing users to hide their whereabouts. He has also introduced a “report” button, which will see anyone who is reported three times banned from the service.

We mentioned last week that Twitter's effectiveness isn't purely self-contained if you're a small business looking to cash in. Two new web analytic reports can now back this theory with some hardcore statistics, as reported by Guardian. Barracuda Networks states that although Twitter's number of users peaked at almost 20% last April, it had dropped to 0.15% in December 2009. In fact, Twitter reported a traffic high in July of 2009, which hasn't been matched since. However looking at traffic doesn't necessarily reflect the true state of affairs, what with all the Twitter client applications that conflate Twitter's popularity with redundant user traffic. Barracuda's study analysed 19 million Twitter accounts for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account's overall activity level. The accounts deleted by month also was growing, from under 4% in April to over 12% in October 2009.

Last month, another Twitter study by RJ Metrics came out in favour of all this data. It says that Twitter has 75 million users, an estimation that Barracuda roughly agrees upon, with a large percentage of accounts being inactive: 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, about 40% of accounts have never sent a single tweet, and 25% of accounts have no followers. Paul Judge, Barracuda's chief research officer, explains Twitter's sluggishness by what he calls the 'Twitter Red Carpet Era'. He says the concentrated growth spurt of early 2009 correlates with several big celebrities joining Twitter, like Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and John Mayer between November 2008 and April 2009. Hence people were logging on to follow their favourite celebrities - and since most of the celebs are already on Twitter, it's likely we won't see another growth spurt like it. In contrast, Facebook seems to be enjoying a steady increase of users. According to Facebook, 50% of the 400 million active users log on to Facebook in any given day, with more than 35 million users updating their status and more than 60 million status updates posted each day.

So what's to be said about Twitter's capability for building small business? Not half so much as what it can do if you're an already-popular celebrity!