netactr

There’s a bit of a heated discussion going right now on Techcrunch due to Thwirl missing from the top 20 popular Twitter clients’ list. Technically, the list is correct. Techcrunch put down the selection criteria loud and clear - “popularity, as measured by unique monthly visits”. Unfortunately it’s a bad metric for client applications for Twitter and many other services that use a mixed web/mobile/desktop access strategy. Current measurement vendors (compete, comscore, hitwise) measure HTTP traffic from browsers. If a web service supports additional access protocols (e.g. JSON calls to its API), that traffic does not get credited. I think there’s an opportunity for one of the three major vendors - or a startup - to come in and innovate. comScore has the measurement client installed on a few million machines, so they should be able to “sniff” other protocols, not just HTTP, and Hitwise buys ISP logs - adding other ports and protocols should not be too difficult.