Snippet: How Many People Use Twitter’s Own Apps? ☇

Benjamin Mayo ran a bit of an unscientific test to see how many people were using official Twitter clients, versus third-party ones like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Osfoora, Twittelator, and so on (via The Verge):

For people that think Twitter will never ban third-party clients because there would be too much backlash, I think this 77% figure shows that Twitter could do it with ease. A large portion of the 23% would be happily herded to a first-party client, as they don’t really care what app they use — it just turned out that the client they first downloaded wasn’t a Twitter-owned app. The only people who would care would be the geeks, like me and anyone else who could be bothered to read this post, who actually care about the client they are using. And let’s face it, Twitter doesn’t care about geeks.

I’d be sad to see Tweetbot lose functionality, but based on this small sample, the numbers are in the favor of Twitter’s own clients.