In a recent announcement, the photo-sharing social network Instagram revealed having hit the mark of 300 million users, thus crossing Twitter which had announced 284 million active users by the month-end September. However, Twitter may not be ready to buy this just as yet since Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and board member, has raised some doubt over this development and has also pointed fingers at the way Facebook counts it active users claiming that the service also considers people who log-in via Facebook connect as their users.
This is what he said in his recent interview with the fortune magazine;
“It’s a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about? The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No one ever talks about, ‘What is a [monthly active user]?’ I believe it’s the case that if you use Facebook Connect — if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect — you’re considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean? It’s become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we’re on the wrong path.”
He further defined Twitter’s efforts for monetisation as being on the right track and also claimed that regardless of how many users took upon Instagram, the popular social networking website was still making more money than the photo sharing platform. William says “Twitter makes a hell of a lot more money than Instagram, if that’s what Wall Street cares about.”
He might sound right on this point that Twitter has more influence on the world than Instagram and it certainly didn’t matter enough that people were looking at some pretty pictures. He snapped about Instagram’s claim saying that “If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter—important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a s*** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”