Twitter Usage Is Down, But Don't Let It Fool You [Updated]

“Twitter usage falls for second month” screams a Bloomberg story in The New York Post this morning — dropping in the U.S. by eight percent between September and October, per comScore.

Though the article is a pretty straightforward telling of Twitter’s traffic decline, there’s a subtext to every story that points to a decline in a digital media darling — that the latest platform of the moment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be … and isn’t that a relief?

It shouldn’t be. While I’m sure the story will get passed around enthusiastically by a demo that might be called the “I-told-you-so’s”, getting in a pleased lather about a Twitter traffic decline obscures the larger trend: that the behavior Twitter has super-charged, of individuals (and companies) sharing content and conversation among large groups of people, ain’t going away. This will be with us, in one way or another, until the day they unplug the Internet. New platforms will emerge; old ones will fade, but short form, social messaging has gone way beyond being a trend, into being a communications staple. Sorry if that disappoints you.

UPDATE: Here’s another, statistically-based reason not to be fooled by declining traffic on Twitter. The comScore numbers apparently don’t measure non-Web applications that people access Twitter from, only traffic to Twitter.com, which is becoming a smaller player in the expanding world of Twitter access points.