As much as we love to experience Twitter through desktop apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic and mobile apps like UberTwitter and Twitterrific, it’s still Twitter’s web interface that dominates in terms of overall popularity.
A study published this week by Rapleaf looked at the most recent 20 tweets from 4 million different Twitter users, and found that 65 percent of them originated from Twitter.com. The most popular Twitter client – TweetDeck – only accounts for 4 percent of tweets, while a variety of other apps make up the rest of tweet distribution.
Here are the full results in pie chart form:
This isn’t necessarily surprising if you consider other recent data, such as:
24 percent of tweets are generated by bots
Only about 5 percent of users have more than 100 followers
About half of users haven’t updated within the last week
Combine that with Twitter’s quitter problem – 60 percent of users quit within the first month – and chances are that a large random sampling is going to come back with a whole lot of tweets from users that haven’t made it nearly so far as to download a client.
That said, there’s no doubt that Twitter can be a much more useful and engaging service once you’ve downloaded an app. That’s why there will always be speculation that Twitter will acquire some of the more successful clients.
Imagine giving new Twitter users a pre-populated version of TweetDeck complete with friends (via Facebook Connect finally?), news, and searches for topics that user is interested in. It totally changes the Twitter experience for new users, and might just make them more likely to stick around. For now though, Twitter seems intent on incremental improvements to the Web interface, like the new homepage that just debuted earlier this month.