Tuesday, Sep 7, 2010    Text size: 

Twitter says it attributes the big increase in mobile users with its initiative of working with the major mobile platforms. Since April, the company has rolled out Twitter for Apple iPhone, Twitter for Blackberry and Twitter for Android, which launched a new version last week.

“[R]emarkably, 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start on mobile now, as opposed to the five percent before we launched our first Twitter-branded mobile client,” Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO, wrote in a blog. “As we had hoped in April, these clients are bringing more people into Twitter and, even better, they are attracting and retaining active users. Indeed, 46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience."

Twitter in April decided on the mobile initiative and expressed it at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference.

“One major area of difficulty I highlighted was getting Twitter on your phone,” Williams said. “We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called ‘Twitter.’ This kept them from using Twitter at all.

"For this reason, we acquired Tweetie and turned it into Twitter for iPhone, complete with a new user sign-up experience.”

Meanwhile, Twitter last week launched Twitter for iPad, which “takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly — without needing to open and close windows or click buttons.”