Will Twitter Ever Be Mainstream?

Twitter's IPO paperwork revealed plenty of ways that its business differs from Facebook, but perhaps the most basic is its reach: There are significantly more people in the United States who don't use Twitter than those who do. For Facebook, the opposite is true.

Twitter had just 49 million monthly active users in the U.S. for the three months ending in June, a number that may be slightly higher now, but probably not too much so, considering it only increased by about one million from the previous quarter. To put that in context, there are an estimated 244 million Internet users in the U.S., meaning roughly a fifth of the country actually uses Twitter at least once a month. Read more...