David Jackson's  Instablog

• Twitter's user growth is no longer accelerating. The rate of new user acquisition has plateaued at around 8 million per month.
• Over 14% of users don't have a single follower, and over 75% of users have 10 or fewer followers.
• 38% of users have never sent a single tweet, and over 75% of users have sent fewer than 10 tweets.
• 1 in 4 registered users tweets in any given month.
• Once a user has tweeted once, there is a 65% chance that they will tweet again. After that second tweet, however, the chance of a third tweet goes up to 81%.
• If someone is still tweeting in their second week as a user, it is extremely likely that they will remain on Twitter as a long-term user.
• Users who joined in more recent months are less likely to stop using the service and more likely to tweet more often than users from the past.

Twitter to me, for me, didn't facilitate communication. It just made it worse. It stops people from speaking. It stops understanding. It stop analysis. It turns simplicity into a detriment. Simple is good. Simplistic, not so much.

Twitter, by some reports, now commands a $1 billion valuation. Not bad for a company with a handful of employees, and no revenue model, much less any idea when a profit stream might come. I guess that billion dollars is for the eyeballs it has attracted, but haven't we already been through eyeball-valuations before? Maybe someone will come up with a way to monetize this kind of thing, but for now, I'll sit on the sidelines as a very interested observer.

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

When Seeking Alpha was in its early days, we published about 25 to 30 articles per day. So it made sense to offer our readers a "Daily Dispatch" email, containing links to all the articles arranged by theme and sector.

But despite our high article rejection rate, we now publish 200 to 250 articles per day excluding conference call transcripts. As a result, the Daily Dispatch email became too long, and the click through rate of any but the top articles was low. This matters, because there are about 150,000 subscribers to that email alone.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen (pictured above) has a must-read article for anyone running a web site or investing in online businesses. He writes: