Facebook, Twitter Growth Flattens

No tree grows to the sky, financial analysts are fond of saying, in predicting growth rates for popular new services, applications and device. Twitter and Facebook are no exceptions, it appears.

Somewhere in June 2009 Twitter stopped growing, according to data gathered by Compete. The same thing appears to have happened to Facebook at the same time.

The findings might be more significant for Twitter than Facebook, simply because Facebook has the larger user base, and therefore would have been expected to flatten out before Twitter. Twitter is several orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook.

In September, Twitter unique visitors fell by 0.17 percent, to 23,538,791, according to Compete. Facebook appears to gotten a bump in visits, but Twitter arguably dropped.

MySpace use dropped 11 percent while Bebo dropped 15 percent over the same peiod, so there possibly are some background changes. People might be switching social networks while others might be tiring of using them.