Among a sample of 25 million tweets posted on March 11, 2011, some 42% were sent via third-party clients—roughly four times the average level implied by Twitter, according to a report by Sysomos.
On March 11, Twitter announced changes to its API (application programming interface) rules concerning third-party client apps. In statements related to the announcement, Twitter's platform lead Ryan Sarver said some 90% of active Twitter users now use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.
But that 90% figure doesn't reflect accurately the popularity of third-party Twitter clients, Sysomos finds.
Roughly 58% of Tweets issued on March 11 were sent via official Twitter apps. Among them, Twitter.com was the most popular (35.4%), followed by Twitter for iPhone (8.8%) and Twitter for BlackBerry (5.5%).
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Among the non-official group, the most popular apps were UberSocial (16.4%), TweetDeck (13.1%), and Echofone (9.2%), all owned by UberMedia.
Why the gap between Twitter's assertion and the Sysomos analysis? Twitter's 90% figure focuses on the total number of users, while the Sysomos data analysis analyzes total tweets.
For example, there are likely many "official" Twitter users who are not very active. Meanwhile, more active, power users are leveraging non-official services such as TweetDeck, UberSocial, and Seesmic.
Third-party clients have been losing market share to Twitter clients as Twitter has expanded its offerings and acquired third-party clients. In June 2009, a Sysomos report showed 55% of Tweets were made using non-official apps (vs. the current 42%).
