October 12, 2007

Tools to post Twitter messages

Until now I did not encounter an analysis of the most frequently used tools to post Twitter messages. So I launched my own little investigation. I extracted all messages from the homepages of over 2000 randomly chosen public Twitter accounts (there are currently over 500,000 Twitter accounts, as reported in this previous blogpost).

45 different tools were used to post 31,944 Twitter messages on 2,087 Twitter accounts. The 5 most frequently used tools, responsible for 91% of all analyzed Twitter messages, are :
1. web - 60.77%
2. im - 9.87%
3. twitterrific - 9.13%
4. txt - 8.43%
5. twitterfeed - 2.80%

Twitter is multi platform, meaning that messages can be posted thru different channels. Of these channels, web remains the most used channel. The instant messaging interface to Twitter (im) is the second most used channel. Twitterrific is an application that has to be installed on a computer to read and publish twitter messages. On the 4th place we find Twitter messages submitted as text messages from mobiles phones (SMS). Twitterfeed offers the possibility to feed your blog to Twitter, meaning that blog posts will be automatically announced on Twitter.

From each Twitter account maximum 21 Twitter messages were taken into account in this analysis. Surprisingly there were 10 Twitter accounts using up to 5 different channels to publish Twitter messages. Are these Twitter users experimenters ?
66.3% of the Twitter users did use only one tool to publish messages, 34.6% did use two different tools, 12% did use three different tools and finally 2.3% did use 4 different tools.

I suppose that some readers of this blog might be interessed in the full list of tools. The full list is shown in the graph and in the detailed list below.



Tool - Percentage
1. web - 60.77%
2. im - 9.87%
3. twitterrific - 9.13%
4. txt - 8.43%
5. twitterfeed - 2.80%
6. Netvibes - 1.43%
7. TwitterFox - 1.22%
8. Facebook - 1.04%
9. TwitBin - 0.98%
10. Twit - 0.56%
11. Twitter Tools - 0.47%
12. Tweetr - 0.46%
13. foxytunes - 0.42%
14. movatwitter - 0.35%
15. TwitterPod - 0.33%
16. PocketTweets - 0.20%
17. TwitterIrcGateway - 0.15%
18. Hahlo - 0.13%
19. Snitter - 0.13%
20. fring - 0.13%
21. Chattr - 0.10%
22. TwitKu - 0.09%
23. TwitterMail - 0.08%
24. Twitter Line - 0.08%
25. tmitter - 0.08%
26. brabblr - 0.08%
27. iTweet - 0.07%
28. yedda - 0.07%
29. TwitterMSN - 0.05%
30. TwitterGram - 0.03%
31. IMified - 0.03%
32. Twadget - 0.03%
33. Twippera - 0.03%
34. bookey - 0.03%
35. ThinCloud - 0.02%
36. Spaz - 0.02%
37. BlogRovr - 0.02%
38. GtkTwitter - 0.01%
39. twibble - 0.01%
40. Twitterlicious - 0.01%
41. tokotto - 0.01%
42. Twitter Opera widget - 0.01%
43. funP - 0.01%
44. Mobypicture - 0.003%
45. mojungle - 0.003%

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Surprised that Jott didn't even make the list.

Lode Broekman said...

And no Tweetbar? *feeling lonely*

Jonathan Snook said...

Any plans to revisit this list on a semi-regular basis? Maybe once a month? Also, over what time span were these tweets collected?

As creator of #19 on the list, I'd be interested to track any movement. :)

Bruno Peeters said...

This list is compiled from tweets from the start until October 2007, with a majority of recent tweets. Third party tools to submit twitter messages have appeared only when Twitter became a success. It is quite unlikely that "old" tweets were produced using one of the third party tools.

An update of this list makes only sense if only recent tweets are taken into account. I will think about it ...

www.valencia-3d.com said...

Thanks so much for this article, quite useful piece of writing.