Eight (8) months ago, Facebook and Twitter were not considered “mainstream”. By main stream I mean having a user base that contains Mothers, Fathers, Aunts, Uncles, and others of the sorts. Fast forward to today where they are both talked about equally, whether it’s on CNN or your favorite e-magazine/blog begging you to “Follow us on Twitter!” Clearly most of the buzz between the two services has much to do with Obama’s team and their influence in the digital communications sector, aka social networking. Their infiltration certainly stirred up a buzz about the two services which is clear today.

But, why if both services are given about the same (if not, more) publicity in the US is Twitter’s pageviews and reach metrics so much lower than Facebook’s? Ok, I understand that Facebook has 175 million+ users around the globe, but still, there hasn’t even been a significant jump in Twitter’s metrics. Don’t believe me? Check out Google Trends for both Facebook and Twitter, then look at the graph above.

…and then I went to update my Twitter status. Realizing that I generally use either my iPhone or Widgets to update, I quickly realized that Twitter doesn’t have “returning” web-based users. Instead, they’re just returning users. Hmmm, now that lots of online interaction may be accomplished through third party apps and not the browser window (thanks to APIs and so forth), perhaps there needs to be a new measurement for network or third party API apps usage for services like these…