Twitter Is For Nerds, And Don’t You Forget It

April 29, 2008 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments

Sometimes us web nerds forget that there is a whole other world of normal people out there. We think everyone uses Twitter, browses in FireFox, and wants an iPhone. The truth is, these are mainly just wildly popular things within our little nerd world.

Of some 850+ users that answered this poll earlier in the week, 93% don’t even know what twitter is.

This is one of the reasons I really enjoy Quibblo. We can throw polls up there on anything we want, and get some interesting quick data from our users. Now bear in mind that the users are heavily tween to teen, but it still is cause for pause the next time that you think “everyone uses twitter”.

  • Asa

    “We think everyone uses Twitter, browses in FireFox, and wants an iPhone. The truth is, these are mainly just wildly popular things within our little nerd world.”

    Our little nerd world sure is growing fast. Firefox is over 160 million users strong. That’s an awful lot of nerds.

    :-)

    - A

  • http://worcesterite.com duncan

    keep your lies to yourself sir.

  • Fred

    So it’s not just me. I was wondering about this the other day, while looking for leaked rumors about the 3G iPhone – does most of the country care, or is it just a few? I guess I’m once again in a nerdy little minority. Doh.

  • http://www.noahbrier.com/ Noah Brier

    Awesome. Love these little reminders.

    (BTW, had a bit of trouble with the math . . . )

  • http://www.andrewteman.org andrew

    Ha, Asa, thanks for the comment. I was merely using firefox to illustrate my point, not to discredit the usage of the browser :)

    For our site(s), which lean largely teen and non-techie, we still see over 85% IE usage, so I suppose it depends where you look. I for one am a FF user, so we are all on the same team.

  • Asa

    I agree that Firefox usage varies from site to site and region to region. While Firefox accounts for about 30% of total Web usage in Europe, it’s only just under 20% in the US. For some very popular sites like Lifehacker, they’re seeing 60% Firefox traffic* while for others like your’s, it’s less than 15%

    But putting the percentage aside, because that varies so dramatically, there are, as I said in my first comment, more than 160,000,000 active Firefox users and about twice that many that have at least tried Firefox. That’s not in dispute and it doesn’t change from site to site or country to country. There are more than 160 million people who are using Firefox to go online regularly.

    Add to that that way back in in 2006, Firefox was ranked by Interbrand Corp. as the No. 8 brand in the world for 2005, just behind Starbucks and Google** — and that was when our number of users was about 1/5th of what it is today.

    Firefox is a mainstream product to more or less the same degree that the iPod is a mainstream product (in terms of total users and brand recognition both.)

    Given those measurable facts, it’s just not reasonable to think of Firefox as still limited to geeks and early adopters.

    * http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=sm3lifehacker&r=13
    ** http://www.thedeal.com/corporatedealmaker/2006/04/mozilla_man.php

  • Asa

    Oh, and I meant to say, sorry if my tone sounded harsh. I’m one of the geeky early adopters using Firefox and Twitter (well, not twittering myself, but following others) so we are all on the same team.

    I just wanted to point out that the time has long past that we could consider Firefox one of our geek tools.

    - A