Twitter is the talk of the walk right now, she’s a diamond in the rough. To prove Twitter is a micro-trend at best and certainly not mainstream, we’ll divide the total number of active users on popular social networks: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter by the total number of Internet users then compare results.

Internet World Stats: roughly 1.3 billion Internet users

MySpace estimation: more than 110 million active users

Facebook estimation: more than 70 million active users

Twitter estimation: between 200,000 and 1 million active users

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MySpace ratio: 0.085 = 8.5%

Facebook ratio: 0.054 = 5.4%

Twitter ratio: 0.00015 to 0.00077 = 0.015% to 0.077%

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Mark J. Penn released a book in September, 2007 titled Microtrends: The Smaller Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. Through several examples he proclaims that a micro-trend is when 1% of the population adopts an idea, product, service, belief etc. Based on this philosophy, Twitter is a micro-trend at best and certainly not mainstream. In fact, Twitter still has ground to cover before it will be a micro-trend.

Being mainstream is an entirely different concept to understand. Look at the percentages for MySpace and Facebook, both vastly more popular than Twitter, yet less than 10% of Internet users are actively participating. Are they mainstream? What is mainstream? Who is mainstream? How will the definition of mainstream change as the Internet grows?

RETHINKING THE NUMBERS: Some countries inside the territories making up the total Internet user count do not have access to these social networks in their native language. Taking this into consideration does not mean that the ratios are wrong, it means that making the translation between languages will help Twitter to become a micro-trend and MySpace and Facebook to go mainstream, unless they already are.