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 ApplicationsMonthly Updates (from TweetStats)
Web22,107,803
TwitterFeed4,509,089
TweetDeck3,284,881
txt2,458,941
Twitterrific2,184,787
TwitterFox1,999,972
Twhirl1,980,543
mobile web1,190,309
Tween911,026
TwitterBerry870,460
TwitterFon763,050
Tweetie553,820
movatwitter442,624
FriendFeed440,075
P3:PeraPeraPrv436,841
Twinkle335,535
Twit330,110
Ping.fm276,177
Perl Net::Twitter239,023
Power Twitter208,294

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.