Earlier this morning, Mashable released a stats-packed article discussing the social microblogging site’s growth flat-line.  The trend of slowing growth and traffic decline started in the mid-months of 2009 and has seemingly come to a standstill in recent months.  That is certainly a 180 degree shift from the 1,300%+ growth Twitter saw in February and March of ‘09.

Why the decline?  Many analysts (including Twitter skeptics) believe Twitter has reached its maturity in terms of usage and won’t make the once inevitable mainstream leap (one would think its current 22mm+ uniques would give it a mainstream label already).  In my mind, the important thing to remember is that measurement sites like Compete.com and Quantcast aren’t taking into account traffic from Twitter desktop application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic.  While the number of people tweeting from Twitter.com may be flat-lining, I’d argue that overall usage is still growing.

As people find their own utility in Twitter, others will continue to follow.  Twitter is a tool centered around the social concept, which means users will keep telling non-users.  The main difference now as compared to a year ago is that those people will be showing new users how to use Tweetdeck on their mobile phone rather than telling them to post to Twitter.com from their desktops.  Each new user will count as a unique during their sign-up month, but after that they very well could never visit the site again and use a desktop app exclusively.

Twitter certainly has some challenges in the coming months (did someone say monetization?).  However, something tells me they aren’t going to fold or be acquired in the near future.  What are your thoughts?

Tags: Growth, Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Twitter