Does Twitter’s Exponential Growth Equal Significant Value?

Even Hitler is on Twitter…at least in this kind of neo-benshi video! (Read more about neo-benshi here).

According to TechCrunch, worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million. If Twitter can keep this rate of growth up, it should cross 50 million visitors by summer. Read the original article and  the many comments here which my friend Jordan Lederer emailed me: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/24/twitter-eats-world-global-visitors-shoot-up-to-19-million/

To me this kind of growth signifies the increasing value of twitter as a tool for communication–or at least a willingness among more and more people to explore what it is and what it does.

However, Facebook may yet overcome Twitter to be the go-to tool for real time communication. Following the link from a tweet from Jason Calacanis (who I follow on Twitter), I found this report by Steve Gilmor on TechCrunchIT:

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Facebook will open up most if not all of their user-contributed data to developers at a developer event tomorrow. This has been long expected and will likely trigger a wave of third-party integration of Facebook streams with other popular feeds, most notably that of Twitter.

He also writes:

Twitter will continue to own the celebrity growth, but those who look to harness this realtime platform for business and personal networking will quickly adopt the more powerful tools now available at FriendFeed and coming online from Facebook and perhaps Google.

I’ve been on Twitter for two months, and Facebook a little less. I continue to find them both powerful but different tools for communication. When I posted about the Springsteen concerts last week, I tweeted the links and posted them on Facebook. Both methods helped readers find my blog and the posts of interest. At this point, I have 250 Facebook “friends” and most of them are friends, people I have met and know, and most of them are local, while very few of my friends are on Twitter so I don’t know and have never met most of my 150 followers.

Can you see me shaking my head as I try to figure this all out?