Tech Town, NC

TechCrunch swears by it. AppScout mocks it. So what’s the real story? Is twitter a digg killer? A flash in the pan? Or is it something else entirely?

On the AppScout side there are some compelling numbers in digg’s favor. They cite a popular PC Mag article which received 38,069 referral visitors from digg, against a measly 84 from twitter. For those scoring, that’s 453 times more traffic from digg. Obviously this is an article that happened to make it high on digg’s front page, but you’d think that something that digg-worthy would have brought in more than 84 hits from Twitter.

On the TechCrunch side, though, you’ve got the fact that Twitter is their 3rd largest source of traffic. Not referral traffic, ALL traffic. That’s impressive. One important detail that’s lacking, though, is how TechCrunch accounts for RSS traffic and how much those feeds account for. If you plugged Twitter into this chart as just another feed reader, how would it compare?

That’s the crucial comparison because, as Steve Gillmor rambled, twitter is supplanting RSS. Some say RSS deserves to be replaced. That’s a far different proposition from replacing digg and other aggregators. Twitter, like rss, is now part of the plumbing of the web, while digg is a news site.

If twitter is to be a digg competitor, it will have to take the form of a Tweetmeme or something similar. In effect, with every retweeted link or tag people are voting on stories without realizing they’re voting so it’s easy enough to power a digg type site with twiter. As Gillmor further rambled, capturing the moment via twitter could turn into something beautiful and organic. That should be great for users right? A more pure version of digg, before it was controlled by elite members.

Wrong.

Guess what – People don’t like organic and random, and that’s not what digg provides. People like the patina of the organic. Digg is curated by its group of die-hard users, much like the New York Times is curated by its editors. I go to digg because I want a certain brand of off-the-wall, semi-topical, slightly geeky news. I go to nytimes.com because I want to know what’s actually happening in the world. I go to techmeme to see what I need to know about the web on a given day. Why would I go to tweetmeme? I don’t have the answer, and that’s one reason AppScout’s results so strongly favor digg – AppScout fits the digg brand.

Does Twitter have the potential to drive as much traffic as digg? Yes. Does that mean it’s a digg-killer? No. Just as digg, the Times, techmeme, and others coexist, so can a tweetmeme. People just need a reason to go there first.

*Update – from Mashable we have a good description of the challenges twitter faces in becoming a useful news aggregator.