Will Twitter ride the mobile wave?

14-04-2010

by Ralph Averbuch

Report says mobile web will outstrip desktop by 2015

Twitter's introduction of its own form of advertising, which it's calling 'promoted tweets', initially appearing in search queries on the website, will get a boost if Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker's latest comments on the mobile web become reality. She recently announced, during a presentation at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, that there are some key trends we can all take away from the recent stats that have come out in her latest 87 page report [PDF]. Called Internet Trends, perhaps the one insight that will catch a lot of IT people is the prediction that the desktop web will prove to just be the warm-up act and that the main show is going to be on mobile. She also argued that the pace of innovation on the mobile web is "unprecedented". This is backed up by the report which claims that, based on the current adoption rates for web enabled mobile, by 2015 there will be more people using phones and other web-friendly mobile kit (like iPads) than from desktops. Some other trends that have already occurred is the change from email to the social web. The report states that 2009 saw social web services eclipse email use. In fact the rate of adoption of the mobile web significantly out-paces the equivalent trend seen in desktop web growth in the '90s. And why's this good for Twitter? Well it's most likely good for all social media services but for Twitter it will allow it to maximise revenue opportunities due to the simplicity of its service. Twitter lends itself so well to all types of mobile device... smart or otherwise. Of course, that must be tempered by stats from Japan which has tended to be a good indicator of where the rest of the mobile web will follow. There just two percent of total mobile revenues are generated from advertising. But it might be that this small percentage is part of a very big number indeed. As Meeker's report concludes, "Rapid ramp of mobile internet usage will be a boon to consumers and some companies will likely win big (potentially very big) while many will wonder what just happened".

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