Twitter is peaking….or is it?

Micropersuasion’s Steve Rubel argues that Twitter is peaking in this article but is it really? I doubt it. Here’s why:

Twitter is experiencing a temporary high from all of the commotion about the service in the past two weeks. That isn’t to say that Twitter is going to stop growing, but it isn’t growing as it normally would. Between Oprah encouraging her army of followers to join the service and Ashton Kutcher racing CNN to one million followers, people most likely jumped on the bandwagon just to see what Twitter was all about and how they could use it.

The problem is that after a few weeks of tinkering, a number of those new adopters will forget that they ever had a Twitter account and go back to their everyday lives. From this drop off, the number of unique visitors to the site will drop off as well, producing a (probably rather large) peak.

This isn’t to say that the service is going the way of MySpace, becoming the ghost of what once was a social media giant. Twitter will continue to grow at the normal rate that it was before Oprah and Ashton made a splash with their respective stunts.

As the numbers start to settle back into normal their trends Twitter will most likely continue to grow at the rate that it was growing pre-Oprah. Users are really starting to pick up on Twitter’s importance in terms of getting breaking news about things in their area like highway closings, forest fires, etc. That aspect of the service alone will keep it thriving for years to come.

Honestly I don’t see Twitter’s peak anywhere near where the traffic is right now. Sure Twitter got the Oprah/Ashton Bump and with that bump it will have some settling to do, but Twitter is in the middle of redefining the way we get breaking news and communicate through the Internet. Don’t expect the tweets to stop anytime soon.