Submitted by Roger Harris06.25.2008
Thunderdome
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This prediction is closed and has been judged.
Judgment on January 5, 2008: By the end of 2008, Plurk did indeed fail to exceed Twitter's growth, which the community correctly predicted. -- The Industry Standard
Original prediction:
A new microblogging service, Plurk, is getting some attention among Twitter fans. The user interface is more colorful and, some argue, user-friendly.
Some Twitterers, fed-up with recent down-time, are hopeful that Plurk could provide a more reliable and flexible alternative. Other Twitterers are loyal to the original service and simple concept, warts n' all.
So which service will win? The jury's out.
This is a prediction that Plurk will not out-grow Twitter in terms of user recruitment and adoption. To measure the performance, note that according to compete.com, Twitter's web Visits went from about 100K to 3 million from June 07 to Dec 07. Therefore to out-compete Twitter, Plurk's monthly web visits will have to exceed that growth rate, i.e., go from where it is now (also about 100K) to reach more than 3 million by Dec. 31, 2008.
Another metric is the People Count measured by compete.com. For Twitter, this went from about 180K to 550K from June to December 07. In order to be judged favorably (i.e., Plurk does fail to outcompete Twitter), both scores for Plurk by the end of Dec 08 will have to be significantly less than both scores for Twitter in Dec 07 (Twitter's scores in Dec 07: Visits = 3,003,976; People Count = 520,380). If they are within 1 percent, the prediction will be judged to have not been met (i.e, Plurk has succeeded in competing with Twitter). The margin of error is to account for potential inaccuracy in visitor statistics, N.B. a minor decline in Plurk's stats in May 2008 does not necessarily presage a permanent decline for Plurk, and should not lead to a premature assumption that Plurk will fail to outcompete Twitter. Twitter suffered a negative 7% growth in People Count in Sep 07 and again in Nov 07.
This prediction will be judged after the end of December, 2008, or earlier if the main Twitter statistics are broken according to compete.com
Price History
Prediction Statistics
| Betting Closes: | Dec 31 2008 | Current Consensus: | 90.02% | Total Bets: | 41 |
| Today's Change: | 0% | ||||
| Life Time High: | 90.02% | ||||
| Life Time Low: | 32.08% |
Comments
"In order to be judged favorably (i.e., Plurk does fail to outcompete Twitter), both scores for Plurk by the end of Dec 08 will have to be significantly less than both scores for Twitter in Dec 07 (Twitter's scores in Dec 07: Visits = 3,003,976; People Count = 520,380). If they are within 1 percent, the prediction will be judged to have not been met (i.e, Plurk has succeeded in competing with Twitter)."
...
"This prediction will be judged after the end of December, 2008, or earlier if the main Twitter statistics are broken according to compete.com"
So to be judged UNfavorably this prediction requires that at least one of Visits or People Count get within 1% of the Dec '07 scores of Twitter in the remaining six months of the year.
The June figures for both took a HUGE jump.
People Count was up 929% to 328,949.
Monthly Visits was up 4561.3% to 1,661,557.
If this month sees a jump of ~79% in Visits or ~57% in People Count then we'll close at the end of July.
I'll admit I didn't expect Plurk to have a chance with this one, but even assuming the massive jumps in June are a fluke, the VERY achievable additional growth required certainly puts this prediction into play, and, if anything, likely to pop next month.
Plurk has slumped each of the past two months. If it gets another jump like the May->June one it can still hit these targets, but that's looking unlikely.
@Bradley, it does not look good indeed. However, a favorable decision can only be made after Dec 31. That is about 4 months away ... long time for ROI to have your $ frozen. You must have put in a sizable bet to swing it 30%+.
According to Compete.com, August Plurk metric is Visits = 1,378,206 and Unique visitors = 247,012 For an unfavorable judgement (which can occur after each monthly stat provided by Compete.com), it would require Plurks metric for Visits = 2,973,937 or Unique visitors = 515,177 (within 1% of Twitter's metrics). Plurk is continuing to enhance user experience (http://blog.plurk.com/). With 4 months to go, it is not entirely impossible but not as likely as it was since June either.
Think I will stay sideline on this one since I have no $ that I could/would park for 4 months.
That was mostly my pulling out a very sizeable bet I made a couple of months ago when I was hoping it would hit after July's numbers.
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