An article on Twitter’s growth stats flatlining Ben Parr caught my attention. According to one Twitter stat, the number of unique visitors per month has dropped to a measly 1.45% growth. That is in December, Twitter got approximately 22.81 million uniques, down from 22.48 million the prior month.

Parr lists a few interesting reasons as to why it could be that Twitter has flatlined, but I think he missed one; Twitter has been overexposed in the media.

Forget Comscore & Quantcast numbers, we need to ask E-Poll guys to include “Twitter” when they do their next “Overexposed Celebrities” poll.

Is this really a big deal? Is this the end of Twitter?

No, not really. Kind of like the housing market bubble, when the media caught Twitter-mania, it artificially inflated the monthly usage stats. Now that everyone and their mother knows about Twitter, and it’s fallen of mainstream media’s new cycle (hey, they got Palin and McGwire to talk about now) I think the stats are simply slipping back to a baseline usage and growth.

Facebook by comparison grew almost 3% according to Compete, that is 1.5% or so more than Twitter.

Hey, how about that? IS that a big deal?

I guess to some (geeks) but not to me. Look, consider the fact that Facebook usage between July and August actually shrank, while Twitter’s usage grew, no one I knew was calling out the demise of Facebook.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com+facebook.com/

Along with Snuggies and the ShamWow, Twitter has gotten a little too much attention this past summer. But when the dust settles, Twitter is going to continue to grow steadily.

Louis Lazaris wrote this great article making a strong case against using those vertical navbars on your website. The above image shows eye tracking diagrams of users visiting various websites, and just like banner ads, you can see how the eye naturally avoids reading into those areas. They’re not even look at your vertical navbars! Note the last screen capture on the right is a Google search results page with no vertical navbars.

Like Lazaris explains, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking, your primary form of navigation should be horizontal, with three to five elements to choose form. Less is more, if you want your website visitors to click through as well as digest the content you are providing, you need to get in the habit of teasing them and not just try to force everything front and center.

Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Vertical navbars are okay for simple lists or calls to action, contextualized as a secondary navigation. And as Lazaris points out, sometimes the exception is simply, “a client who insists on it.”

Why do designers still use vertical navbars? Most of the time is just an indicator of a novice designer that is lacking some fundamentals. We shouldn’t see the use of vertical navbars as site’s primary navigation if you except your website to be considered professional designed… unless of course, you really know what you’re doing.