In an average day, I log-in to no less than twenty different websites. Some of these are blogs I work on. Some are communities I follow. Then there’s Amazon, eBay, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.  Each place has its own username and password and some make me change my password on a regular basis. Firefox remembers most of them for me, thank heavens, but it’s not an exact science.

So in comes social media logins. These are the sites that allow you to bypass their own login system by using Facebook, Twitter, etc. At first glance, it seems like a great solution. You only have one front door key to your house, so why not one “key” for the entire internet. But which key?

If you had to guess, what percent of American internet users would you say uses Twitter? 30%? 15%? 10%?

According to the latest report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, the answer is 8%. Eight! How can that be? Twitter is one of the most popular social media services. Famous people Tweet every day. Twitter is used to help raise money during a disaster and detectives in England are being trained to use the service to help track criminals. So how can it be that only 8% of internet users are hanging with the bird?

In September’s Pew Report, it was noted that 24% of internet users used Twitter or “another service to share updates.” This time around, the researches asked a more specific question, namely, “Do you use Twitter?” Can’t get more specific than that.