I get very bent out-of-shape when people post inaccurate or misleading statistics. TechCrunch just recently had a post on the Top 20 Twitter Applications in which they used traffic to the applications’ web sites to determine the top 20 apps. While they admit it’s not the best, they left out one of the top Twitter clients (which didn’t make Loic happy, of course) and the data really is not representative of the truth.
As part of TweetStats, I pull in data from Gnip on every single Twitter update and the associated application. So, here are the real Top 20 Twitter applications.
| Twitter Applications | Monthly Updates (from TweetStats) |
|---|---|
| Web | 22,107,803 |
| TwitterFeed | 4,509,089 |
| TweetDeck | 3,284,881 |
| txt | 2,458,941 |
| Twitterrific | 2,184,787 |
| TwitterFox | 1,999,972 |
| Twhirl | 1,980,543 |
| mobile web | 1,190,309 |
| Tween | 911,026 |
| TwitterBerry | 870,460 |
| TwitterFon | 763,050 |
| Tweetie | 553,820 |
| movatwitter | 442,624 |
| FriendFeed | 440,075 |
| P3:PeraPeraPrv | 436,841 |
| Twinkle | 335,535 |
| Twit | 330,110 |
| Ping.fm | 276,177 |
| Perl Net::Twitter | 239,023 |
| Power Twitter | 208,294 |
Footnote: This is out of slightly over 50 million Twitter updates in January. It does not included protected users and there may be some tweets missing due to downtime in Twitter or Gnip. But for the most part, this is very representative.
Update: Another quick stat - in January, 1,231 different client applications were used to post updates to Twitter.