Some figures concerning the Twitosphere

In a article on Technology Review on April 6, 2007, the total number of Twitter users as of late March 2007 was said to be 100.000 and doubling every three weeks. This would mean that there are currently (on April 19) over 200.000 Twitter users.


In a blogpost on the UMBC eBiquity Blog a picture was shown of the global distribution of Twitter users. This graph is based on 300.000 Tweets (Twitter messages) from 35.000 Twitter users - taken from the Twitter public timeline. From the 35.000 Twitter users, 19.000 or 54% specified their geographical location.


According to the statistics available on the Twitterment site, there are on average over 20.000 Tweets (Twitter messages) each hour. The number of Tweets per day varies between 50.000 and 100.000. These figures are probably only based on the Twitter public timeline. Twitter messages from non-public users are not taken into account.


According to a blogpost on the BlogAllAlong blog Twitter is getting around 11.000 hits a second on peak times, which is a quite a lot for a site supported by Ruby on Rails. Scaling a Ruby on Rails environment is not easy task, as it is not possible to talk to more than one database at a time.