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Check out the graph for yourself:

It’s pretty clear to see that the last month has seen Twitter’s growth curtail to almost nothing. This of course is very strange based on the rampant growth that the service saw in the months prior. Om Malik over at GigaOm had some interesting ideas on this (actually going so far as to say ‘Twitter is dead’) including some description of the ‘Twitpocalypse’ – From GigaOm:

There is a bug in the Twitter system that would be like Y2K. Apparently each tweet is identified by an integer value and the maximum signed 32-bit integer value for most database applications is 2,147,483,648. And since Twitter is getting so popular, we are inching close to that number. (http://tinyurl.com/mlbqtl)

You can check out the progress here. It’s an interesting thought, but in actual reality this won’t affect Twitter itself, it only stands to affect third party Twitter apps using the Twitter API that store tweets as 32-bit integers.  If they’re smart, they will simply store them as 64-bit integers, which will increase the maximum numbers hugely, as Twitter almost certainly does already.

So what’s the deal with the stoppage in growth for the service? I’m not exactly sure, but I imagine that after their Time Magazine cover and continued adoption by celebrities, this will be a one month problem.

Mashable also notes the issue and also is quick to point out that Facebook continues to grow strong, showing no signs of weakness. Perhaps a reason for this is the 90-10 problem that Twitter faces (90% of content on Twitter is created by 10% of the site’s users). With Facebook, it doesn’t seem like this is a problem, as user profiles are centralized and user interaction is mostly based on actual social interactions, not conversations in the cloud. But these services serve very different purposes, that much is clear – even if they are both thrown into the realm of ’social media’.