Twitter Facts

Tweespeed

2009-07-09T00:45:00.001+02:00

The success of Twitter has inspired a lot of developers to create their own Twitter mashup. TweeSpeed is an example of this phenomenon. TweeSpeed is a web service that calculates the number of Twitter messages, also called tweets, sent in the last minute. TweeSpeed is based on the public timeline, it grabs information for the 5 last minutes and calculate an average speed for one minute. The actual number of Twitter messages is higher, Twitter messages from private accounts do not show up in the public timeline.

TweeSpeed offers three views of the number of Twitter messages per unit of time. There is the gauge at the front page. There is also a view of the speed by minute for the last day. And finally there is a view of the speed by hour for the last week.

The events around the death of Michael Jackson had a strong impact on Twitter, as already reported by the traditional media such, e.g. CNN.

Looking at the graphs made available by TweeSpeed, I discovered that it was possible to show more history that just the last day or the last week. The graph below starts at June 13, 2009. The rumors and the formal announcement of the death of Michael Jackson caused a sharp increase in the number of Twitter messages on June 25, 2009. The next peak was on June 29, 2009 - when all kind of rumors concerning the cause of death and the funeral arrangements were spreading around. The funeral and memorial service on July 7, 2009 triggered the third peak.

The graph shows also a cyclical trend. The volume of Twitter messages in the past four weeks is significantly lower on Saturdays and Sundays. The peaks occur typically around 20:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which is around 16:00 US Eastern time and also 13:00 US Pacific Time. The volumes of Twitter messages are at their lowest level between 11:00 and 12:00 UTC, which is around 7:00 and 8:00 US Eastern time and also 4:00 and 5:00 US Pacific Time, when the majority of the population in the United States is probably still sleeping. It looks like Twitter users from the United States are still dominating Twitter usage. Coincidentally, the volumes of Twitter message are at their highest levels during the working hours. Does this mean that Twitter users (especially in the United States) are still allowed to Twitter during working hours ?

Twitter Search

2009-05-08T00:32:00.001+02:00

There are announcements that Twitter will add new functionalities to Twitter Search (Cnet). Links will be crawled (which is currently not the case) and a reputation ranking system will be worked out. This is of course good news.

But some of the current limitations of Twitter Search are not discussed. The Twitter Search API currently returns up to 1500 search results. Older tweets cannot be found thru the API. According to Mashable there were over 10000 tweets per hour related to swine flue. Even if there are less than 1500 matching tweets for a search query, tweets older than a couple of months will not be found. Tweets from several months apparantly disappear in a black hole for Twitter Search.

Another issue to be tackled with a reputation ranking system is that it has to take into account that there are many (sub) communities on the Twitter platform. They are all linked together thru Twitter users who are within multiple communities. Twitter users in a country can be considered as an example of such a community, as shown in the various previous posts on this blog where the twitospheres in particular countries were analyzed. But there are also communities by topics of interest.

Reputation is important within a context. A user from France will probable use French for his tweets within the French Twitter community, whereas a German Twitter user will use German. How will a global reputation tackle these contexts ? How will a reputation ranking system detect the language used in tweets ? Someone can be very influential in a specialized community, but on a global level never appear in a top 1000.

Reputation is a property linked to a person, where a person can have a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a Linkedin profile, one or more blogs. But he can also be present in the traditional world, he can be invited as speaker on major conferences, he is perhaps author of groundbreaking books, ... A reputation ranking system within Twitter will only catch a part of someone's "global" reputation.

Nevertheless I am looking forward to the new functionalities that Twitter will be releasing in their Twitter Search product, hopefully soon.

Poken on Twitter

2009-05-03T14:37:00.007+02:00

A poken is a small physical device capable of exchanging online social networking data with other poken devices. A poken has a USB connector, so you can plug the device into your computer to connect your device to the Poken web database. On the Poken website you can decide which social networking profiles you want to share with your Poken friends. This social network profile can be your Twitter account. If two poken devices are held close to each other, they will exchange contact data of the owners.

Pokens are produced by a Swiss company. The inventors of this device saw it as a digital alternative of exchanging business cards. Pokens were launched in the last trimester of 2008. They became pretty soon a hype in the Netherlands. Only in March 2009 this device got attention on the TechCrunch blog. Pokens were also presented at the SXSW conference, where they became talk of the conference - as Twitter was during the 2007 edition of SXSW.

I have been tracking the buzz on Twitter regarding pokens for a while now. You can find below some graphs showing insight on how the poken hype evolved over the past months. This analysis was performed on data obtained thru Twitter Search. Only Twitter messages from public Twitter users were available for analysis. Since September 2008 I discovered over 31,000 Twitter messages from 7641 different Twitter users.

The first graph shows the number of Twitter messages per day related to poken.

You can compare this graph with the result of Google Trends for Poken - showing the usage of the term in searches. Another reference chart is the number of blogposts found by Blogpulse refering to Poken.

The hype on Twitter started before the hype on blogs (shown on the Blogpulse chart) and the hype in search trends (Google Trends).

Another interesting graph is the cumulative number of Twitter users who posted at least one Twitter message related to poken. This graph shows that the number of users is still increasing.

I tried to link the 7641 different Twitter users to their location, their country - based on the information in the Twitter profiles.

The top 5 countries ranked according to the number of messages :

Netherlands 34% of all messages related to Poken
Germany 16%
Japan 15%
USA 9%
Belgium 4%

The top 5 countries ranked according to the users :

Netherlands 24% of all users posting Twitter messages related to Poken
Germany 16%
USA 14%
Japan 9%
Belgium 5%

A similar distribution can be found in the information for Google Trends for Twitter. Both lists are dominated by The Netherlands. Swiss internet users search often for poken, however Twitter uses from Switzerland are less active, they are only ranked 7.

The hype in the different countries can be observed in the graph showing the number of Twitter messages related to poken. Twitter users in the Netherlands started posting Twitter messages related to poken from December 2008, with a first peak around mid January 2009. Since then the hype around Poken has faded away within the Dutch Twitter user community. Twitter users in Germany picked up the Poken hype around mid March 2009, with a first peak on March 28. The hype is still continuing at a rate of about 100 Twitter messages per day.

A similar pattern can be observed in the graph showing the number of Twitter users having posted messages related to poken. Currently there are more Twitter users in the Netherlands who have posted Poken related Twitter messages, but it the trend continues there will be soon more German Twitter users.

Twitter messages related to poken came from over 70 countries, from all over the world. There came from the Netherlands and Germany (as can be observed in the graphs shown above), from Japan and the United States, but also from countries such as Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand, China and Malaysia. Dedicated Twitter accounts for Pokens have been set up in different countries : Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, Slovakia, Spain and South Africa.

Happy Birthday Twitter

2009-03-21T12:50:00.004+01:00

The initial idea of Jack Dorsey that resulted in the development of Twitter is available on Flickr. This idea dates back to 2000, when Jack Dorsey signed up to Livejournal. The current wikipedia article on Twitter states that Twitter began as a research project in March 2006 at Odeo, a podcasting company.

The first tweets of some of the oldest Twitter users are still available. The first tweets were published on March 21, 2006, exactly 3 years ago. Happy Birthday Twitter.

Jack Dorsey, 12:50 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Twitter Message number 20

Biz Stone, 12:51 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Twitter Message number 21

noah, 1:00 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 22

Tony Stubblebine, 1:01 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 25

Evan Williams, 1:02 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 28

Dom Sagolla, 1:03 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 31

Tim Roberts, 1:08 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 36

rayreadyray, 3:40 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 70

ariel, 4:16 PM Mar 21st, 2006 - Message number 79

News on Twitter

2009-02-16T08:24:00.002+01:00

On January 23, 2008, a 20 year old man forced his way into a child day care center in Dendermonde, a small town in Belgium, Europe. He attacked the staff and the little children in the child day care center with a knife. One staff member and two babies were killed, several other staff members and babies were severly wounded. The agressor managed initially to escape, but he was arrested 90 minutes later.

Very quick the news of this horrible attack found its way to Twitter. As soon as the attack was mentioned on websites of Belgian newspapers, Twitter users picked up the story and expressed their agony in their Twitter messages. Later on the articles on Belgian news sites were also announced on Twitter, in Twitter messages that were automatically created. The news about this horrible attack became also known to news agencies, newspapers, radio and television stations and news aggregators worldwide, who also published it on their Twitter accounts.

Using Twitter Search, I traced the Twitter messages containing the words "Dendermonde" or "Termonde" - the French name for Dendermonde. From October 2008 until the moment of this writing, these words were mentioned in 1450 Twitter messages from 409 different Twitter users. The graph below shows the number of Twitter messages containing the words "Dendermonde" or "Termonde" per hour.

The peak on the graph is the hour after the stabbings were commited. Later smaller peaks occured when new facts about the agressor became public and when the funeral services for the victems were held.

As can be expected, a large part of these Twitter users can be located in Belgium. Belgium is followed by the Netherlands and France, neighbouring countries of Belgium. There were also Twitter users from countries far from Belgium announcing the horrible facts, e.g. Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Portugal and Serbia in Europe, also in the USA and Canada, in Brazil and South Africa, and also in Asia (Malaysia, Philippines).

74% of the Twitter messages containing the words "Dendermonde" or "Termonde" contained a hyperlink to a story on a newssite or a blogpost. The most productive Twitter users turned out to be Twitter users from news agencies, newspapers, radio and television stations and news aggregators. The 409 Twitter users posting messages containing the words "Dendermonde" or "Termonde" have in total over 100,000 followers. As Twitter Search is only capable of finding Twitter messages for public Twitter users, the total number of Twitter users who published messages containing the words "Dendermonde" or "Termonde" will probably exceed 409. The total number of Twitter users who were potentially informed of the horrible facts on January 23, 2009 at Dendermonde will probably exceed 100,000.

This analysis of this event shows that traditional media have discovered their way to Twitter. A large part of the messages published after the dramatic stabbings were indeed automatically published by these Twitter news accounts.

News travels also far and travels fast. Within a couple of hours Twitter users from locations far outside Belgium also twittered the horrible facts.

Currently the storm caused by the horrible facts has faded away. Life in and around Dendermonde has returned to its normal state. Unfortunatly several families will have to live with the tragical loss of life.

Short Twitter Names

2009-02-15T12:30:00.003+01:00

There are no official figures of the number of Twitter users. Estimations go up to 8 million. As the number of Twitter users increases daily, new Twitter users find out that it is not easy to find a Twitter name that is still available. I had a close look at the shortest Twitter names, these consisting of only 1 and 2 characters.

All 1 character long Twitter names are currently taken. 6 of these 37 Twitter names (A-Z, 0-9 and underscore) are private Twitter accounts, 4 of these Twitter names are without updates.

There are 1369 Twitter names of 2 characters long - all combinations of A-Z, 0-9 and underscore. The good news is that 76 of these combinations are still free. 205 of the 2 character long Twitter accounts are private, 41 are suspended due to strange activity. 296 of the 2 character long Twitter accounts are still without updates.

The oldest 2 character long Twitter account is twitter.com/ev. It is the Twitter account of Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter.com. Other famous 2 character long Twitter accounts are ie - IE (yes Internet Explorer), twitter.com/om - Om Malik and twitter.com/f1 - Formula 1. Some of the 2 character long Twitter account are cleary fake accounts, e.g. twitter.com/sf - San Francisco, but without friends and updates, twitter.com/fr - Francophonie, "voulez-vous coucher avec moi ?" and twitter.com/uk - no meaningful name or bio, but 195 followers.

A lot of the 1 or 2 character long Twitter names are taken but not really used. In total there are 1406 combinations. 1289 combinations or 92% taken. Only 473 of these Twitter accounts have a location, 384 of these locations are "real" locations.

The 1289 Twitter accounts have on average 49 friends (other Twitter accounts that are followed), with twitter.com/s the Twitter account with the most friends - 11722. 572 Twitter accounts have no friends at all.

The 1289 Twitter accounts with a (very) short name are on average being followed by 186 other Twitter users, with twitter.com/ev having the most followers - 98712. 346 Twitter accounts do not have followers.

The 1289 Twitter accounts with a (very) short name have on average 405 updates. The most productive Twitter account is twitter.com/zb, with as of this writing 45469 updates. 300 Twitter accounts are still waiting for their first update.

Of the 1289 Twitter accounts with a (very) short name 136 accounts stand out as blank accounts, accounts without friends, followers or updates.

If you are looking for a (very) short Twitter Name, you are either too late of you will have to hurry to get your Twitter account registered. Or you could consider to persuade the holder of one of the inactive accounts to hand over his Twitter account.

Twitter traffic according to Hitwise

2009-01-23T01:42:00.001+01:00

Hitwise has published over the last days three posts with interesting information on traffic to the Twitter website. They analysed traffic to twitter.com in three countries : UK, USA and Australia.

Let's start with the UK. Twitter.com is the 291st most visited website in the UK. Internet traffic has increased by 974% over one year, see the graph below.

Hitwise does only taken direct traffic to twitter.com into account. If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers would be even higher.

There are also a few figures on downstream traffic, on what type of links do Twitter users click on :
17.6% of Twitter’s downstream traffic goes to entertainment websites,
10% of goes to News and Media websites,
14.6% goes to social networks,
6.6% to blogs and finally
4.5% to online retailers.

A few days earlier an analysis of Twitter traffic in the USA was also published. According to Hitwise, Twitter.com attracks more visitors than Digg. Twitter is ranked #84 in computers and internet category, one place before Digg, ranked #85.

Traffic to Twitter from Australia has also grown significantly, 517.9% up over one year, as shown on the graph below.

TwitterFriends

2009-01-08T00:56:00.003+01:00

Twinfluence was one of the first services offering metrics to quantify the influence of a Twitter user.

TwitterFriends goes a step further, by offering more metrics and additional information for individual Twitter users.

This is the list of metrics calculated by TwitterFriends.

Size of relevant net (outgoing) : Number of Twitter users, the submitted Twitter user replied to more than once the last 30 days
Size of relevant net (incoming) : Number of Twitter users that replied to the submitted Twitter user more than once within the last 30 days
Fans : Number of Twitter users that replied to guykawasaki within the last 30 days
Stickiness : Number of people who replied at least twice / total number of replying users
Twitter Rank : This is the position of the submitted Twitter user in the ranking of Twitterers receiving the most replies
Ratio of outgoing to incoming contacts
Overlap of outgoing and incoming net
Tweets sent / day 50 Average
Follow cost in milliscobles
Replies sent / day
Conversation Quotient (CQ) : Share of Tweets by the submitted Twitter user that were replies
Conversational Rank
Replies received / day
Links posted by the submitted Twitter / day
Link Quotient (LQ) : Share of Tweets by the submitted Twitter that included links
Replies with Links by the submitted Twitter user's friends / day
Link per friend

Six of these metrics are plotted on a graph, called TwitGraph. Below you can find printscreens of the results for two famous Twitter accounts : Barack Obama and Guy Kawasaki. Both graphs are quite differently. Guy Kawasaki engages actively in Twitter conversations. Barack Obama is the most followed user, but this Twitter user does not publish very often Twitter messages and this Twitter user does not reply to twitter messages of its followers.

Retweets and Twitter Bots

2008-12-28T23:06:00.000+01:00

There is recently a lot of discussion going on concerning the authority of Twitter users : Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur. Some bloggers propose that the number of followers is a good measure of the authority of a Twitter user. Others argue that other elements should be taken into account, e.g. the number of retweets. A retweet is when a Twitter user copies a twitter message from another Twitter user in their network and shares it with their network, hereby mentioning the author of the original Twitter message.

As Loic Le Meur stated that there were over 7,000 tweets for the Le Web 3 conference that was held in the beginning of December 2008, I checked the number of search results produced by Twitter Search (previously Summize). I came accross a remarkable sequence of tweets. Have a look yourself, e.g. by trying this search.

One tweet (by dotdean) is retweeted by several Twitter bots, resulting in 10 additional tweets. You can find the sequence of all these tweets in the graphic below.

Furthermore 10 additional URL shortcuts were created : http://tr.im/2ool, http://tinyurl.com/98cx3x, http://is.gd/dOdC, http://is.gd/dOdF, http://bit.ly/14i9j, http://tinyurl.com/76dvzl, http://bit.ly/h4p9, http://bit.ly/JebP, http://tinyurl.com/9jjwvz, http://is.gd/dOtd and http://is.gd/dOte.

With this example in mind, I think there are some problems by taking the number of retweets into account for the authority of a Twitter user.

First State of the Twitosphere in Malaysia

2008-12-14T23:18:00.003+01:00

Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. In the series of states of the Twitosphere on this blog, I did not yet publish a state of the Twitosphere for a Southeast Asian country. The first question in such an analysis is the number of Twitter users in Malaysia. Twitter user search is already disabled for a while, so I cannot inform you on the number of Twitter users in Malaysia according to Twitter itself.

Based on the location info in the Twitter profiles, I was able to find 3429 Twitter users in Malaysia, all active users. These users make an explicit reference to Malaysia, the country itself or a geographical location within this country. Persons who have closed their Twitter accounts are not included in this number. Because the number of Twitter users not mentioning a true location in their Twitter profile is estimated at around 50%, the actual number of Twitter users in Malaysia will probably exceed 3429. With a population of 27,730,000 people (source Wikipedia), the Twitter user density for Malaysia is one Twitter account for every 8087 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in Malaysia
The graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts from Malaysia. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts. Twitter users who haven't published any messages and Twitter users with a private profile (their messages are only visible for their approved followers) are not included in this graph. Twitter started late in Malaysia. The oldest Twitter users date back from March 2006. Only 6 months later first users from Malaysia started using Twitter.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Malaysia
http://twitter.com/Adriana - Adriana - first message on August 27, 2006
http://twitter.com/adamgiles_com - Adam Giles - first message on September 4, 2006
http://twitter.com/praveenrajan - Praveen Rajan - first message on September 5, 2006
http://twitter.com/Clowve - Clowve - first message on October 4, 2006
http://twitter.com/JerryOng - Jerry Ong - first message on October 6, 2006
http://twitter.com/syedsyahrul - syed syahrul zarizi - first message on October 31, 2006
http://twitter.com/tropicaljantie - tropicaljantie - first message on November 3, 2006
http://twitter.com/reneetan - Renee - first message on November 3, 2006
http://twitter.com/SmartGuy - SmartGuy - first message on November 9, 2006
http://twitter.com/bee - bee - first message on November 21, 2006

Private or public
309 Twitter acounts from Malaysia or 9% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 682 Twitter accounts from Malaysia or 20% do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Malaysia follows 34 Twitter accounts.

Top 10 following
http://twitter.com/May_ - Mayen - 2,858 following
http://twitter.com/thangwai - thangwai - 2,051 following
http://twitter.com/home_remedies - home_remedies - 2,000 following
http://twitter.com/LearnOnlineBiz - LearnOnlineBiz - 2,000 following
http://twitter.com/joker400 - Ibrahim - 2,000 following
http://twitter.com/ashique - Ashique M. Abdullah - 2,000 following
http://twitter.com/vacom - vacom - 1,999 following
http://twitter.com/esthercsk - Esther Cheang SK - 1,998 following
http://twitter.com/Gloson - Gloson Teh - 1,991 following
http://twitter.com/razali87 - Mohd. Razali - 1,979 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 77 Twitter users from Malaysia or 2% have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. The messages published by these Twitter users are only read by themselves (and by search engines). An average Twitter user from Malaysia has 31 followers.

Top 10 followers
http://twitter.com/Gloson - Gloson Teh - 1,790 followers
http://twitter.com/Artmaker - I-Ming - 1,711 followers
http://twitter.com/home_remedies - home_remedies - 1,339 followers
http://twitter.com/LearnOnlineBiz - LearnOnlineBiz - 1,095 followers
http://twitter.com/chetzyusof - Chetz Yusof - 1,032 followers
http://twitter.com/bobkor - bobkor - 839 followers
http://twitter.com/WayneLiew - Wayne Liew - 820 followers
http://twitter.com/joker400 - Ibrahim - 816 followers
http://twitter.com/euginn - euginn - 766 followers
http://twitter.com/JerryOng - Jerry Ong - 751 followers

Updates
An update is the term refering to Twitter messages published by a Twitter users. These are also called tweets. The average number of updates for a Twitter users from Malaysia is 123. 205 Twitter users (or 6%) are still waiting for their first message to be published. Below you can find the top 10.

Top 10 updates
http://twitter.com/kiongchiu - Sparkish - 15,905 updates
http://twitter.com/NewStraitsTimes - New Straits Times - 11,703 updates
http://twitter.com/rasso - Lan Rasso - 9,458 updates
http://twitter.com/ppmy - I follow Penangites! - 7,074 updates
http://twitter.com/Sanjaghak - FateMeh - 5,712 updates
http://twitter.com/neonplanet - NeonPlanet - 4,763 updates
http://twitter.com/liewcf - Liew Cheon Fong - 4,522 updates
http://twitter.com/Artmaker - I-Ming - 3,800 updates
http://twitter.com/reese - reese spykerman - 3,638 updates
http://twitter.com/jfkjohan - Johan F. Khairuddin - 3,505 updates

Degree of activity
29% of all Twitter users from Malaysia have publised at least one message in the last 7 days.
41% of all Twitter users from Malaysia have not published a message for more than a month.
9% of all Twitter users from Malaysia is private, so no information on their degree activity is available.
On 6% of the Twitter accounts from Malaysia not a single message has been published.

Conclusion
The results of the analysis of the state of the twitosphere in Malaysia are comparable to the results for other previously analyzed countries.

From August 2006 there were a few Malaysian users from Twitter. A first increase in popularity occured around March 2007. A next increase in popularity of Twitter started from April/May 2008, followed by a next increase in adoption speed from November 2008. Compared to the Western European countries the Twitter user density is still lower, so there are probably further a lot of people in Malaysia to be convinced of the use of Twitter.

First State of the Twitosphere in Costa Rica

2008-10-29T21:55:00.003+01:00

A while ago a commenter on this blog asked if I could also analyze the twitosphere in his country, Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the east and south, the Pacific Ocean to the west and south and the Caribbean Sea to the east (source : Wikipedia). I have never been to Costa Rica, so I do not have personal memories or opinions on this country. Nevertheless, I found it a good idea to have a closer look at the usage of Twitter in Costa Rica.

The first question in such an analysis is the number of Twitter users in Costa Rica. Twitter user search is temporary disabled, so I cannot inform you on the number of Twitter users in Costa Rica according to Twitter itself. Twitdir reports 338 Twitter users for location Costa Rica.

Based on the location info in the Twitter profiles, I was able to find 507 Twitter users in Costa Rica, still active users. Persons who have closed their Twitter accounts are not included in this number. Because the number of Twitter users not mentioning a true location in their Twitter profile is estimated at around 50%, the actual number of Twitter users in Costa Rica will probably exceed 507. With a population of 4.133 million people (source Wikipedia), the Twitter user density for Costa Rica is one Twitter account for every 8,152 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in Costa Rica
The graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts from Costa Rica. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts. Twitter users who haven't published any messages and Twitter users with a private profile (their messages are only visible for their approved followers) are not included in this graph. Twitter started late in Costa Rica. The oldest Twitter users date back from March 2006. Only 8 months later first Costa Ricans started using Twitter.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Costa Rica
http://twitter.com/gringuitica - Erin - first message on January 11, 2007
http://twitter.com/darcia - David Arcia - first message on February 14, 2007
http://twitter.com/lizrincon - Liz Rincon - first message on March 16, 2007
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - first message on March 18, 2007
http://twitter.com/soloesteban - Esteban Solorzano - first message on March 20, 2007
http://twitter.com/405 - Cuatro Cero Cinco - first message on March 22, 2007
http://twitter.com/MariHo - Mario HB - first message on March 28, 2007
http://twitter.com/nityananda - Nityananda das - first message on March 29, 2007
http://twitter.com/conejita236 - Angel Ackermann - first message on April 6, 2007
http://twitter.com/BarryStev - Barry Stevens - first message on April 22, 2007
http://twitter.com/Toxicomaniac - toxic - first message on April 26, 2007

Private or public
59 Twitter acounts from Costa Rica or 12% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 84 Twitter accounts from Costa Rica or 17% do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Costa Rica follows 31 Twitter accounts.

Top 10 following
http://twitter.com/iecr - Spanishinstitute - 2,000 following
http://twitter.com/muchacostarica - MuchaCostaRica.Com - 1,727 following
http://twitter.com/NicoPisani - NicoPisani - 655 following
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - 493 following
http://twitter.com/iCostaRicaTV - iCostaRicaTV - 425 following
http://twitter.com/jenfos - jenfos - 418 following
http://twitter.com/ReverendDoctor - TheReverendDoctor - 418 following
http://twitter.com/remediosgraphic - remediosgraphic - 310 following
http://twitter.com/AlexOtarola - Otárola - 213 following
http://twitter.com/stevekatz - stevekatz - 212 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 40 Twitter users from Costa Rica or 8% have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. The messages published by these Twitter users are only read by themselves (and by search engines). An average Twitter user from Costa Rica has 24 followers.

Top 10 followers
http://twitter.com/muchacostarica - MuchaCostaRica.Com - 606 followers
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - 518 followers
http://twitter.com/NicoPisani - NicoPisani - 443 followers
http://twitter.com/jenfos - jenfos - 283 followers
http://twitter.com/iecr - Spanishinstitute - 283 followers
http://twitter.com/stevekatz - stevekatz - 261 followers
http://twitter.com/SEOCharlie - SEOCharlie - 236 followers
http://twitter.com/fusildechispas - cristian cambronero - 196 followers
http://twitter.com/remediosgraphic - remediosgraphic - 158 followers
http://twitter.com/gringuitica - Erin - 153 followers

Updates
An update is the term refering to Twitter messages published by a Twitter users. These are also called tweets. The average number of updates for a Twitter users from Costa Rica is 118. 44 Twitter users (or 9%) are still waiting for their first message to be published. Below you can find the top 10.

Top 10 updates
http://twitter.com/Gorileo - Rogelio Umaña - 3.715 updates
http://twitter.com/berylcorea - berylcorea - 2.883 updates
http://twitter.com/reiterstahl - RQR - 2.248 updates
http://twitter.com/SEOCharlie - SEOCharlie - 1.957 updates
http://twitter.com/OzaCR - OzaCR - 1.804 updates
http://twitter.com/willvv - Will Vásquez Vásquez - 1.621 updates
http://twitter.com/zoncho - Carlos Murillo - 1.461 updates
http://twitter.com/yeco - Yeco - 1.337 updates
http://twitter.com/olesha - olesha - 1.209 updates
http://twitter.com/Rafa - Rafael Gonzalez - 1.207 updates

Degree of activity
37% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica have publised at least one message in the last 7 days.
30% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica have not published a message for more than a month.
12% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica have published at least message on in the period between 7 and 31 days (older than a week, but in the last month).

12% of all Twitter users from Costa Rica is private, so no information on their degree activity is available.
On 9% of the Twitter accounts from Costa Rica not a single message has been published.

Conclusion
Costa Rica is a relatively small country in Central America. It is not known for a significant contribution to what's happening on the internet or in the blogosphere of twitosphere. Neverthelessm there is an active Twitter community in Costa Rica. This community started rather late, but it is growing at a relatively high speed.

BarackObama followers

2008-10-14T00:06:00.001+02:00

Twitter User BarackObama has an incredible amount of followers. This Twitter account follows every Twitter user that follows BarackObama. Currently Twitter User BarackObama is following over 100,000 other Twitter users. A rough estimation of the number of Twitter messages per day per users can be made of two sources. Twiturly scans between 200,000 and 250,000 Twitter messages per day, TwitDir reports 3.18 million Twitters users. This leads to the following calculations.

Number of Twitter Users (TwitDir) : 3,183,544
Daily Twitter messages (Twiturly) : 200,000 - 250,000
Number of Twitter messages per day and user : 0,063 - 0,079
BarackObama followers : 101.350
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per day : 6.367 - 7.959
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per hour : 265 - 332
Twitter messages from BarackObama followers per minute : 4.4 - 5.5

It seems quite unlikely that Barack Obama himself would read all these Twitter messages. I even doubt it that a single person is capable of reading all these messages (5 per minute, 24 hours per day).

Twinfluence

2008-10-13T19:36:00.002+02:00

Influence of a Twitter account does not solely depends on the number of people who are following the Twitter account. It also depends on the size of the network of the followers of Twitter account. Twinfluence applies the concept of social capital to propose a set of new influence measures for Twitter users (from the about page).

Reach: Reach is the number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers). Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity: Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence. Of course, this number could jump significantly with the addition of a few high-profile followers.

Social Capital: Tthe average first-order network of a Twitterer's followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer's followers have a lot of followers themselves.

Centralization: This is a measure of how much a Twitterer's influence (reach) is invested in a small number of followers. Centralization scores range from 0% (completely decentralized) to a theoretical 100% (completely dependent on one Twitterer).

Efficiency: The more people you follow, the more time you have to spend reading and filtering tweets. Efficiency is a measure of how many people a Twitterer had to follow in order to build up their reach, as a percentage.

A few examples to illustrate these new influence measures.

BarackObama, the most followed Twitter user

SteveRubel, a digital marketer working at Edelman Digital

TwitFacts, the Twitter user I created for this blog

These new influence measures are interesting. They have however also their limitations. Influence should be measured for persons. Barack Obama uses various channels to illustrate his influence : speaches, debates, personal encounters, his website, his Twitter account, … On a lower scale everyone is active on different channels. Steve Rubel writes on his blog, he writes columns, he speaks at various events, he works for various clients as a digital marketer at Edelman Digital. On addition to that, he has a stream of Twitter messages. Influence can be measured for each of these channels : number of blog posts linking to Steve Rubel's blog, number of readers and comments on his columns, number of speaking engagements, number of Edelman clients wanting to work with him, ... All these measures are only capable of capturing a tiny aspect of someone's influence. Influence should ideally be measured for a person, not for a specific channel. Twinfluence is however an interesting approach for a specific domain for which no influence measures were available.

Twinfluence uses a clever way to deal with the Twitter API. All requests to the Twitter API are performed with the Twitter user credentials supplied by the user. After several queries, there is a big risk that a user will receive this error message :

Twitter Top 100 lists compared

2008-10-12T20:45:00.003+02:00

In a previous post (Top Twitter Users) I listed several sites where lists of top Twitter users can be found. I wanted to get an idea on the quality of these lists. Do they contain the same Twitter users ? Do they provide the same data ?

I considered four top lists of Twitter users ranked by the number of followers.
1. Twitdir Top 100 followed : number 1 on the list has 94937 followers, there are 6586 followers for number 100
2. Twittercounter The top 100 most popular Twitter users : number 1 on the list has 94600 followers, there are 7156 followers for number 100
3. Twitterholic Top 100 based on Followers : number 1 on the list has 94894 followers, there are 6562 followers for number 100
4. Twittown Top 150 followers (only first 100 considered) : number 1 on the list has 6941 followers, there are 986 followers for number 100

The four lists combined count 179 different Twitter users. It is clear that the top 100 list from Twittown is outdated. Twitter user @BarackObama has only 5441 followers according to Twittown, in reality this Twitter user has 94937 followers.

Let's compare the three other list. The three lists combined cound 122 different Twitter users, see table below.

Twitdir has the highest values for number of followers. Twittercounter has the lowest values.
* If Twitdir is compared to Twitterholic, the differences are up to 43 followers.
* If Twitdir is compared to Twittercounter the differences are up to 337 followers.
* If Twitterholic is compared to Twittercounter the differences are up to 294 followers.

It looks like that Twitdir Top 100 followed has the most actual data, although some Twitter users are missing. On the other hand Twitdir is the least user friendly. The top 100 is presented in 10 parts, each consisting of 10 Twitter users. Furthermore it takes an awful lot of time to load the 10 pages. If you want a quick overview of all top 100 Twitter users, I would recommend the Twitterholic Top 100.

TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
BarackObama	94937	94894	94600
kevinrose	66341	--	66251
leolaporte	57771	57762	57703
cnnbrk	43880	43857	43628
alexalbrecht	38623	38618	38595
MarsPhoenix	--	36237	36182
JasonCalacanis	36148	36130	36083
Scobleizer	35605	35590	35473
Veronica	33393	33382	33333
twitter	--	--	31820
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
THErealDVORAK	31476	31471	31399
macrumors	31376	31375	31353
hotdogsladies	27617	27614	27577
TechCrunch	26722	26705	26679
ijustine	23679	23675	23636
ricksanchezcnn	23176	23172	23152
twittervision	22982	--	22915
guykawasaki	21087	21084	21061
ev	19692	19683	19635
CaliLewis	19661	19656	19647
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
Twitterrific	19357	19344	19333
rtm	19287	--	19241
StephenColbert	18888	18881	18692
chrispirillo	18797	18790	18770
wilw	18769	18760	18740
patricknorton	18365	18365	18345
biz	18148	18144	18076
013	--	--	18134
twitlive	--	17465	17460
dooce	17280	17277	17077
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
laughingsquid	16797	16785	16762
chrisbrogan	16358	16343	16322
garyvee	16356	16339	16267
bloggersblog	15901	15901	15889
ambermacarthur	15427	15423	15419
darthvader	14864	14852	14830
woot	14636	14627	14588
gruber	14403	14398	14378
hashtags	--	--	14220
zappos	14088	14080	13983
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
mashable	13393	13382	13356
jowyang	13074	13068	13044
NotHenryRollins	12924	--	--
TwitPic	12781	12776	12747
feliciaday	12540	12534	12441
zefrank	--	12360	12332
davewiner	11962	11959	11947
hodgman	11846	11842	11764
dlprager	--	11815	11806
drhorrible	--	11698	11641
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
problogger	11652	11649	11631
jakemarsh	--	11598	11600
loiclemeur	11435	11426	11403
majornelson	10846	--	10834
Larry	--	10843	--
newmediajim	10820	10816	10785
timoreilly	10800	10792	10714
DannyTRS	10755	10755	10748
Ed	10676	--	--
Ed_Dale	--	10673	10646
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
WilHarris	10641	10640	10631
wordpress	10625	10617	10545
jeffcannata	10508	10507	10499
UstreamTV	10455	10440	10433
Ihnatko	10336	--	10332
skydiver	10308	10300	10265
mollywood	10267	10265	10260
twitter_status	10003	--	10009
jack	9921	9914	9881
zeldman	9846	9845	9816
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
jonathancoulton	9683	--	9663
SteveJobs	9677	--	9639
macworld	9639	9638	9603
jkottke	9612	9607	9592
TUAW	9500	9495	9482
steverubel	9428	9424	9418
technorati	9374	9369	9330
brianshaler	9333	9332	9331
om	--	9314	9292
xenijardin	9116	9112	9100
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
nytimes	8783	8783	8759
s	--	--	8711
osen	--	--	8632
SethGodin	8623	--	--
revision3	--	8555	8535
cnn	8426	8424	8410
warrenellis	8298	8293	8263
gapingvoid	8268	--	8263
missrogue	8144	8141	8129
factoryjoe	8060	8055	8050
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
socialmediaclub	8047	8036	8023
digg	8021	8018	8000
nprpolitics	7986	--	7909
simplebits	7780	7775	7767
sarahlane	7670	7663	7638
Maggie	7553	7554	7530
acedtect	7529	7527	7523
BreakingNewsOn	7475	7474	7462
DanRaine	7349	7349	7338
Damiano	7339	7332	7330
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
Dizzed	7269	--	--
jeffpulver	7249	7246	7239
springnet	7200	7200	7197
PhillyD	--	7195	--
buckhollywood	7177	7179	7161
CNETNews	7165	7162	7156
waynesutton	7147	7144	--
StephenTColbert	7026	7028	--
timer	7010	--	--
mybloglog	7004	--	--
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
fredwilson	6987	6983	--
lonelysandwich	--	6927	--
seesmic	6795	--	--
Pistachio	6792	6787	--
Zadi	6746	6733	--
mozillafirefox	--	6745	--
Borat	--	6674	--
adamcurry	6621	6618	--
Mickipedia	6586	6582	--
tferriss	--	6582	--
TwitterUser	Twitdir top 100	Twitterholic top 100	Twittercounter top 100
ryanblock	--	6568	--
briansolis	--	6562	--

These figures presented above date from Friday October 10, 2008.

Top Twitter Users

2008-10-10T22:30:00.000+02:00

For those who are interested in how to find top Twitter users, I have created a collection of links to top lists of Twitter users according to several criteria.

In the first place there are global rankings.

1. Twitterholic

Twitterholic.com offers Top 100 lists based on Followers, Friends and Updates.

2. Twitdir

Twitdir presents Top 100 followed, Top 100 updaters, Top 100 favouriters and Top 100 followers lists.

3. Twittercounter

Twittercounter has a list called The top 100 most popular Twitter users.

4. Twittown

Twittown, the unofficial Twitter community, offers Top 150 followers, Top 150 updates and Top 150 following lists.

5. Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader gives you a grade based on the power of your Twitter profile. It also offers the list with the highest ranked Twitter users.

6. Twitterposter

TwitterPoster is a visual application based on Twitter API. It provides a visual representation of the degree of influence of the Twitter users. It does not present a top list as such, but only top Twitter users are shown.

There are also specialized rankings of Twitter users.

7. Twitstat

Twitstats offers various lists of Twitter users followed by @twitstat : Top 10 today, yesterday, most engaging, most social, happy people, funny people, angry people, tired people, most replies, perfect tweets.

8. Top analyst twitterers / analyst twitter index

On the Technobabble blog, a post in July presented a ranking of analysts.

9. Newspapers that Twitter

Rankings of American newspapers offering Twitter feeds can be found on the graphicdesigner blog. There is a July ranking and an August ranking.

10. Unofficial 2008 Top 50 Tweeples

Finally you can always submit your own Twitter account for the Unofficial 2008 Top 50 Tweeples list.

3 million Twitter users

2008-09-21T18:12:00.002+02:00

On June 29, 2008 I wrote on this blog that Twitter reached 2 million users - according to Twitdir. Twitter has passed another milestone a few days ago, 3 million users. As Twitdir only "knows" Twitter users with a public profile, the actual number of Twitter users is higher, as discussed in this blogpost.

The growth of Twitter users follows an exponential curve - at least until now. If the same trend continues, 4 million will be reached around mid November. Around Christmas the 5 million mark will be reached. 6 million will be reached around mid January 2009 and 7 million around Mid February. Whatever the trend will be, I will continue to monitor this trend.

A few figures

2008-09-12T20:52:00.002+02:00

It has been a while since the previous post on this blog. So let's restart with a few figures.

2 months, 2 weeks and 5 days
Time elapsed since the previous post on this blog

24
Number of full time employees at Twitter HQ, mentioned in post on Twitter blog

63
Percentage of male Twitterers, mentioned in Time

99.88
Availability of Twitter in August 2008 according to Pingdom

796,000
Number of Twitter users who have send a message since December 1st, 2007 (in a comment on previous post on this blog)

1,000,000
Number of Twurls already processed by Tweetburner (shortened URLs)

2,927,894
Number of Twitter users currently known to Twitdir

100 million
Registered users of Facebook, reported by ReadWriteWeb

2 million Twitter users

2008-06-29T22:34:00.003+02:00

On January 6, 2008 I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million users before April 1, 2008. The source for the number of Twitter users was (and still is) Twitdir. Twitdir finally reported 1 million Twitter users by the end of April. Twitdir announced that their was a flaw in their algorithm to count Twitter users, so the algorithm was changed. The backlog of Twitter users to be detected was caught up several weeks later. Yesterday evening I noticed that Twitdir reported just below 2 million Twitter users. Today the number reported exceeded 2 million.

The oldest Twitter accounts still active were created on March 21, 2006. It took Twitter over 550 days to get to 500,000 users (around the first half of October 2007). 150 days later (around mid March 2008), there were 1 million Twitter users. 50 days later (beginning of May 2008) there were already 1.5 million Twitter users. Another 50 days later Twitter had over 2 million Twitter users (end of June 2008). All these figures are based on the number of users reported by Twitdir.

The question of course is the reliability of the Twitdir figures. I performed a little test. Both Twitter and Twitdir offer the possibility to execute a location based search, returning both the number of Twitter users for a given location. I looked up the number of Twitter users reported by both sources for several locations.

For the 9 search arguments shown above, the number of Twitter users found by Twitdir is 20% to 30% lower than the number found by Twitter itself. It is likely that the number of Twitter reported by Twitter is also an underestmation of the real number. It is possible that there could be at this moment already over 2.5 million Twitter users. Who is capable of providing more insight on this issue ?

Failwhales

2008-06-27T22:58:00.003+02:00

With the arrival of Twitter, the English vocabulary has gained several new words, Twitter-speak. The Twitter Glossary at the Twitter Fan Wiki is impressive.

I just discovered a new Twitter related new concept, a failwhale. I noticed that several Twitter users who strongly dislike the whale picture informing them that Twitter is not working as expected, changed their profile picture. Their current profile picture is now a failwahle.

Some clever guys have already set up a Twitter account and a website. And furthermore, at Zazzle you can buy failwhale related objects. If Twitter is down again, Twitter users should consider sending out letters or postcards to their followers, each marked with a failwhale stamp.

First State of the Twitosphere in France

2008-06-26T17:23:00.002+02:00

On this blog I already published several posts with a detailed analysis of the twitosphere in a specific country. From time to time people ask me to have a closer look at their country, e.g. France.

The first question in such an analysis is the number of Twitter users in France. Twitter locates 4371 Twitter users in France (Twitter users who explicitely mention France in their location), Twitdir reports 3367 Twitter users.

Based on the location info in the Twitter profiles, I was able to find 6229 Twitter users in France, still active users. Persons who have closed their Twitter accounts are not included in this number. Because the number of Twitter users not mentioning a true location in their Twitter profile is estimated at around 50%, the actual number of Twitter users in France will probably exceed 6229. With a population of 64.473 million people (source : Wikipedia), the Twitter user density for France is one Twitter account for every 10350 inhabitants. Other European countries have an higher Twitter density, e.g. in Norway there is a Twitter account for every 1350 inhabitants, in The Netherlands there is a Twitter account for every 2800 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in France
The graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts from France. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts. Twitter users who haven't published any messages and Twitter users with a private profile (their messages are only visible for their approved followers) are not included in this graph.

Oldest Twitter accounts from France
twitter.com/jdenoy - Johan Denoyer - first message on 18/07/2006
twitter.com/nicoguyon - nicolas guyon - first message on 19/07/2006
twitter.com/danielito - Daniel Gergès - first message on 12/09/2006
twitter.com/tewfiq - tewfiq - first message on 27/09/2006
twitter.com/hakonlo - Håkon Lorentzen - first message on 26/10/2006
twitter.com/i_randulo - fake-randulo - first message on 27/10/2006
twitter.com/zelig - Rafi Haladjian - first message on 5/11/2006
twitter.com/cnicules - ciprian - first message on 6/11/2006
twitter.com/ghotspot - Guy - first message on 16/11/2006
twitter.com/MathieuCoste - Mathieu - first message on 19/11/2006

Private or public
769 Twitter acounts from France or 12% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 997 Twitter accounts from France or 16% do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from France follows 29 Twitter accounts.

Top 10 following
twitter.com/arnaudrobail - rnud Robil - 7.379 following
twitter.com/jeanlucr - Jean-Luc Raymond - 6.313 following
twitter.com/stellafrederic - stellafrederic - 6.260 following
twitter.com/wallpapers - Wallpapers Zone - 5.255 following
twitter.com/neo_igs_police - neo_igs_police - 3.573 following
twitter.com/MMartin - Martin Menu - 1.842 following
twitter.com/HenryMichel - HenryMichel - 1.560 following
twitter.com/LucMandret - Luc Mandret - 1.387 following
twitter.com/valerefagot - valerefagot - 1.213 following
twitter.com/betapolitique - betapolitique.fr - 1.131 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 279 Twitter users from France or 4% have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. The messages published by these Twitter users are only read by themselves (and by search engines). An average Twitter user from France has 32 followers.

Top 10 followers
twitter.com/arnaudrobail - rnud Robil - 2.204 followers
twitter.com/jeanlucr - Jean-Luc Raymond - 2.134 followers
twitter.com/pressecitron - Eric - 1.688 followers
twitter.com/MMartin - Martin Menu - 1.319 followers
twitter.com/FredCavazza - Frédéric CAVAZZA - 1.293 followers
twitter.com/fubiz - Romain Colin - 1.061 followers
twitter.com/MonsieurDream - Monsieur Dream - 1.035 followers
twitter.com/rodrigo1971 - Rodrigo SEPULVEDA - 1.034 followers
twitter.com/fuelmyblog - Kevin Dixie - 909 followers
twitter.com/guim - GuiM - 887 followers

Updates
An update is the term refering to Twitter messages published by a Twitter users. These are also called tweets. The average number of updates for a Twitter users from France is 239. 296 Twitter users (or 5%) are still waiting for their first message to be published. Below you can find two top 10 lists, one with Twitter users where messages are published in an automated way, the second one with "real" Twitter users.

Top 10 updates from "real" Twitter users
twitter.com/Ravana - Ravana - 12.603 updates
twitter.com/strangeblackh - strangeblackhole - 12.163 updates
twitter.com/Bechamel - Jibé - 11.923 updates
twitter.com/Charles_Liebert - Charles Liebert - 9.901 updates
twitter.com/princesszeni - ? zeni - 8.568 updates
twitter.com/dimic - Dimic - 7.747 updates
twitter.com/SimonRobic - Simon Robic - 7.649 updates
twitter.com/jegoun - jegoun - 7.165 updates
twitter.com/seestribe - Jonathan Bonzy - 7.009 updates
twitter.com/stagueve - stagueve - 6.965 updates

Top 10 updates from non human Twitter accounts
twitter.com/lejddfr - lejddfr - 101.639 updates
twitter.com/lci - La Chaine Info - 25.305 updates
twitter.com/fonzz - fonZz - 23.069 updates
twitter.com/xanapa - xanapa - 15.698 updates
twitter.com/FRANCE24 - france24 - 11.831 updates
twitter.com/eddymitchum - Eddy Mitchum - 11.033 updates
twitter.com/funkastik - funkastik - 8.242 updates
twitter.com/pomemail - pomemail - 7.833 updates
twitter.com/le_figaro - le_figaro - 6.755 updates
twitter.com/LeMondeWorld - Le Monde - World - 6.421 updates

Tweet frequency
The tweet frequency is het average number of Twitter messages published on a unit of time, calculcated from the first message published. Twitter accounts created in the last 30 days and Twitter accounts without a Twitter message in the last 30 days were not taken into account.

Top 10 tweet frequency real Twitter users
twitter.com/strangeblackh - strangeblackhole - 52,20 tweets/day
twitter.com/Ravana - Ravana - 30,59 tweets/day
twitter.com/dimic - Dimic - 26,00 tweets/day
twitter.com/rade - radeville - 23,73 tweets/day
twitter.com/waden - Thomas Guillot - 23,55 tweets/day
twitter.com/madd0 - Mauricio DIAZ ORLICH - 22,61 tweets/day
twitter.com/marcvasseur - marcvasseur - 22,07 tweets/day
twitter.com/cpafo - Christopher Rousseau - 20,26 tweets/day
twitter.com/geoffreydorne - Geoffrey Dorne - 18,55 tweets/day
twitter.com/UlrichFR - Ulrich - 18,41 tweets/day

Top 10 tweet frequency non human Twitter accounts
twitter.com/xanapa - xanapa - 71,03 tweets/day
twitter.com/pomemail - pomemail - 49,26 tweets/day
twitter.com/eddymitchum - Eddy Mitchum - 30,14 tweets/day
twitter.com/le_figaro - le_figaro - 21,86 tweets/day
twitter.com/LePoint - LePoint.fr - 19,19 tweets/day
twitter.com/LeMondeWorld - Le Monde - World - 16,51 tweets/day
twitter.com/lesechos - Les Echos - 16,41 tweets/day
twitter.com/GeekMusik - GeekMusik - 15,52 tweets/day
twitter.com/EMSC - EMSC - 13,41 tweets/day
twitter.com/rcstrasbourg - rcstrasbourg - 12,95 tweets/day

Degree of activity
30% of all Twitter users from France have publised at least one message in the last 7 days.
36% of all Twitter users from France have not published a message for more than a month.
17% of all Twitter users from France have published at least message on in the period between 7 and 31 days (older than a week, but in the last month).

12% of all Twitter users from France is private, so no information on their degree activity is available.
On 5% of the Twitter accounts from France not a single message has been published.

Conclusion
The graphs show that there is an active Twitter community in France. It is still growing day by day. The penetration of Twitter in France is however lower than in other European countries. This can be caused by the fact that the Twitter web interface is only available in French (and in Japanese ...). Knowledge of English is not widespread within the French population and people from France tend to stick to their language.

Compared to other countries already analyzed, I was not able to detect many "non human" Twitter accounts, Twitter accounts on which the messages are automatically generated. Examples for such "non human" Twitter accounts are Twitter accounts for news services.

If the Twitter web site would be available in other languages, Twitter would be a greater success, especially in European countries such as France.

Tweetburner - clickthrough rates

2008-06-23T07:22:00.000+02:00

Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter. Links can be recognized as "twurl.nl". Tweetburner is an initiative of two entrepreneurs from The Netherlands.

One of the nice features of Tweetburner is that it generates a lot of statistics. Most of these statistics are even public available to everyone interested. As of this writing, Tweetburner has generated 274418 Twurls (shortened URLs), which have alltogether been clicked 2192254 times. This means that on average each shortened URL has been clicked about 8 times.

I had a closer look at 60 Tweetburner users from The Netherlands, the home country of Tweetburner. The full details of these users can be found in the list below. This list contains probably the most active Tweetburner users from The Netherlands combined with several less active users.

The global average clickthrough rate for Tweetburner shortened URLs is about 8 times. The average clickthrough rate for the observerd Dutch Twitter users varied from 4 (@iPieter) to 54 (@erwblo). The clickthrough rates have to be linked to the number of followers for each of the observed Twitter accounts. If a Twitter user has only a limited number of followers, the number of clicks will be probably low. If on the other hand a Twitter user has very high number of followers, the number of clicks will be (very) low. The ratio of average clicks per number of followers varies for the 60 observed Dutch Tweetburner users from 2% (@pixites - 803 followers) to 91% (@tuecursor - 7 followers).

As the graph illustrates, there seems to be a power relationship between the average number of clicks per follower and the number of followers. Twitter users with a very limited number of followers have very high clickthrough rates. Almost all their followers click on the links in their Twitter messages. Twitter users with a high to very high number of followers have a low clickthrough rate (less then 5%).

This is an analysis of 60 Tweetburners users from the Netherlands. These 60 users have only generated less then 2% of all shortened URLs. It remains to be seen if these conclusions can be extrapolated to all Tweetburner users and even further to all Twitter users using URL shortening services (e.g. tinyurl).

This is the full list of the analyzed 60 Tweetburners users from the Netherlands.

TwitArcs

2008-06-11T22:24:00.002+02:00

TwitArcs is a new tool to visualize content from Twitter. TwitArcs takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term.

Have a look at the snapshot below, or try it yourself (here).

3rd State of the Twitosphere in Belgium

2008-05-29T19:17:00.004+02:00

The combination of living in Belgium and being interested in Twitter inspired me in the past to analyze the twitosphere in Belgium. The first analysis of the twitosphere on country level - for Belgium - was published on this blog on April 17 last year (this post). Several months later - on August 16 last year - I published an update.

This is my third attempt to analyze the community of Twitter users in Belgium. I particulary interested in the evolution of Twitter usage. Was the hype over or is the Twitter community still increasing ? The first question in such an analysis is the number of Twitter users in Belgium. Twitter locates 1491 Twitter users in Belgium, Twitdir reports 1252 Twitter users, Terraminds (when it was still available) reported 920.

Based on the location-info in the Twitter profiles, I was able to find 2118 Twitter users in Belgium, still active users. Persons who have closed their Twitter accounts are not included in this number. Because the number of Twitter users not mentioning a true location in their Twitter profile is estimated at around 50%, the actual number of Twitter users in Belgium will probably exceed 2118. With a population of 10.5 million people (source : Wikipedia), the Twitter user density for Belgium is one Twitter account for every 5000 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in Belgium
The graph below shows the history of the Belgian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Belgian Twitter accounts. Twitter users who haven't published any messages and Twitter users with a private profile (their messages are only visible for their approved followers) are not included in this graph.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Belgium

http://twitter.com/marcio - marcio - first message on 26/07/2006
http://twitter.com/zingo - Martin - first message on 22/08/2006
http://twitter.com/BuzzWorkers - Ben Borges - first message on 21/09/2006
http://twitter.com/onepointzero - Colin O'Brien - first message on 22/09/2006
http://twitter.com/lode - Lode - first message on 26/09/2006
http://twitter.com/jacobeus - Nicolas Jacobeus - first message on 28/09/2006
http://twitter.com/roald - Roald - first message on 28/09/2006
http://twitter.com/vpieters - Veerle Pieters - first message on 17/11/2006
http://twitter.com/malchick - Malchick - first message on 18/11/2006
http://twitter.com/nijst - Stijn F. - first message on 18/11/2006

Private or public
243 Twitter acounts from Belgium or 12% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 294 Twitter accounts from Belgium or 14% do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Belgium follows 25 Twitter accounts.

Top 10 following

http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 1.184 following
http://twitter.com/sidelinemag - Side-Line Magazine - 823 following
http://twitter.com/fotograaf - www.bart.la - 743 following
http://twitter.com/thesisters - Anna & Betty - 484 following
http://twitter.com/quinze - Denis Balencourt - 438 following
http://twitter.com/asimov - Bruno Durdu - 408 following
http://twitter.com/bartvanbelle - Bart Van Belle - 379 following
http://twitter.com/bwards - bwards LIVE! - 350 following
http://twitter.com/nilsgeylen - Nils Geylen - 351 following
http://twitter.com/scharre - Johan Schaerlaeckens - 315 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 136 Twitter users from Belgium or 6% have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. The messages published by these Twitter users are only read by themselves (and by search engines). An average Twitter user from Belgium has 31 followers.

Top 10 followers

http://twitter.com/vpieters - Veerle Pieters - 2.616 followers
http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 1.193 followers
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 775 followers
http://twitter.com/aguerra - Andrea Guerra - 528 followers
http://twitter.com/crossthebreeze - Kris Hoet - 494 followers
http://twitter.com/tijs - Tijs - 462 followers
http://twitter.com/bnox - Clo Willaerts - 435 followers
http://twitter.com/Pietel - Pietel - 433 followers
http://twitter.com/mschenk - Maarten Schenk - 379 followers
http://twitter.com/emich - Michael Uyttersprot - 373 followers

Updates
An update is the term refering to Twitter messages published by a Twitter users. These are also called tweets. The average number of updates for a Twitter users from Belgium is 373. 108 Twitter users (or 5%) are still waiting for their first message to be published. Below you can find two top 10 lists, one with Twitter users where messages are published in an automated way, the second one with "real" Twitter users.

Top 10 updates from non human Twitter accounts

http://twitter.com/dsonline - De Standaard Online - 87.331 updates
http://twitter.com/ClopMonitor - ClopMonitor - 48.300 updates
http://twitter.com/rtlinfo - RTL Info - 41.563 updates
http://twitter.com/radioo - radioo - 37.773 updates
http://twitter.com/lesoir - Le Soir - 18.295 updates
http://twitter.com/tijd - De Tijd - 12.311 updates
http://twitter.com/lecho - L'Echo - 11.527 updates
http://twitter.com/belgium_nl - belgium_nl - 10.686 updates
http://twitter.com/radioo_donna - radioo_donna - 10.657 updates
http://twitter.com/vrtnieuwsnet - De Redactie - 8.157 updates

Top 10 updates from "real" Twitter users

http://twitter.com/emich - Michael Uyttersprot - 7.747 updates
http://twitter.com/atog - Koen Van der Auwera - 7.614 updates
http://twitter.com/Kmeron - FrF_Kmeron - 6.159 updates
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 6.058 updates
http://twitter.com/Inferis - Inferis - 6.036 updates
http://twitter.com/nilsgeylen - Nils Geylen - 4.637 updates
http://twitter.com/studio_stefke - Stefan Van De Velde - 4.567 updates
http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 4.536 updates
http://twitter.com/Mateusz - Mateusz - 4.313 updates
http://twitter.com/imkedielen - Imke Dielen - 3.724 updates

Tweet frequency
The tweet frequency is het average number of Twitter messages published on a unit of time, calculcated from the first message published. Twitter accounts created in the last 30 days were not taken into account.

Top 10 tweet frequency non human Twitter accounts

http://twitter.com/radioo - radioo - 275,18 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/radioo_donna - radioo_donna - 270,26 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/belgium_nl - belgium_nl - 222,40 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/dsonline - De Standaard Online - 212,68 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/ClopMonitor - ClopMonitor - 175,64 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/fmbrussel - FM Brussel Live! - 152,83 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/rtlinfo - RTL Info - 119,70 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/radioo_radio1 - radioo_radio1 - 111,43 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/belgium_fr - belgium_fr - 101,25 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/lesoir - Le Soir - 56,45 tweets/day

Top 10 tweet frequency real Twitter users

http://twitter.com/Kmeron - FrF_Kmeron - 22,08 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/Tjakkahhh - Tjakkahhh - 21,12 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/emich - MichaÃ"l Uyttersprot - 17,66 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/atog - Koen Van der Auwera - 17,47 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/rrradiogirrrl - Sigrid - 15,92 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/vaantje - Thomas - 15,89 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/WimProot - WimProot - 13,79 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 13,25 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/vrxj81 - Johan Vrolix - 12,00 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/studio_stefke - Stefan Van De Velde - 11,64 tweets/day

Degree of activity
36% of all Twitter users from Belgium have publised at least one message in the last 7 days.
31% of all Twitter users from Belgium have not published a message for more than a month.
17% of all Twitter users from Belgium have published at least message on in the period between 7 and 31 days (older than a week, but in the last month).

12% of all Twitter users from Belgium is private, so no information on their degree activity is available.
On 5% of the Belgian Twitter accounts not a single message has been published.

Conclusion
The graphs show that there is a group of heavy Twitter users in Belgium. There users produce many tweets, they follow lots of other users, they are being followed by lots of other users. On the other hand there is a large portion of Twitter accounts that can be considered as probable inactif : not a single message or a very small number of messages, no or only a few followers, no or only a few following, a lot of time since the last tweet. Between these two extremes there is large group of the remaining Twitter users.

I was a little bit surprized to notice that the growth of the Twitter user in Belgium has not stopped yet, it even looks that the growth rate is even increasing. This surprized me because of the group of A-list bloggers in Belgium (who were the first to find their way to Twitter) already started using Twitter a long time ago. Twitter is attracting new users who probably do not have a blog. The growth of Twitter amongst Belgians clearly shows that the Twitter platform fulfills a need.

Compete on Twitter Traffic Explosion

2008-05-19T18:29:00.000+02:00

Compete has released on its blog some figures concerning Twitter usage in the US. Currently Twitter is attracting 1.2 million people per month. This figure is remarkable, because Twitter has currenlty a little bit over 1.6 million users with a public profile (as reported by Twitdir).

One of the main conclusions of Compete is that Twitter is a weekday event. On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day. Still according to Compete, a Twitter user is young, male and addicted to Twitter.

For more info take a look at the post at Compete.

1.5 million Twitter users

2008-05-15T22:31:00.001+02:00

On this blog, I have been tracking the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir. On April 28, I announced that Twitter passed the 1 million mark.

According to Twitdir, Twitter has currently over 1.5 million users. Over a period of a little bit more than two weeks Twitdir was capable of detecting 0.5 million users. This sudden increase in the number reported by Twitdir is probably due to a change in its algorithm, as announced on the Twitdir blog.

Who wants to make a guess when Twitter will reach the 2 million mark ?

Individual Twitter user statistics

2008-05-13T21:52:00.002+02:00

If you are looking for statistics for an individual Twitter user, there are different possibilities.

Tweetstats
Damon Cortesi released in december 2007 a script to calculate statistics for individual Twitter users. If you were interested in your personal stats (or someone else his stats), you had to install the script yourself and run it. After a while Damon Cortesi releaed a webified version at Tweetstats.com. The colorfull stats display for a given user the number of tweets per month, per day of the week and per time of the day.

Tweetstats statistics for @marketingfacts

Xefer Twitter Statistics
Xefer is another site offering similar statistics. The Xefer Twitter Statistics are generated using Yahoo Pipes and the Google Chart API. This site offers a two dimensional visualisation of the tweets of a specified Twitter user by time of day and day of week. Graphs showing the tweets by month, by day of week and by hour are also presented.

Xefer Twitter Statistics statistics for @marketingfacts

Twitstat
Twitstat is a site launched in august 2007, see also this previous post on this blog. Twitstats collects the tweets of the Twitter users following @twitstat on Twitter.

Twitstats statistics for @marketingfacts

Statistics for twitter users
Statistics for twitter users is a project from Belighted, a Belgian company. In order to get statistics for your own Twitter profile, you have to follow @statistics on Twitter. It looks like this project is still in a very early stage. Only three Twitter users are currently monitored.

Tweeterboard
Tweeterboard takes another approach. Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations with other Twitter users. Tweeterboard is aware of about 3700 active Twitter users with public updates, each following Twitter user @tweeterboard. Reputation points are the way influence is measured in Tweeterboard. They are calculated using an undisclosed algorithm. Reputation points are based on the conversations of a Twitter over the last 28 days, which means scores can jump around a lot.

Tweeterboard statistics for @marketingfacts

If you know of other sites offering individual Twitter user statistics, please share this by leaving behind a reaction below.

Twitter : niche or mainstream ?

2008-04-30T17:01:00.003+02:00

Hitwise has published a post on their blog about the US internet visits to twitter.com. The good news is that traffic is increasing. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month. These figures look impressive, but still according to Hitwise, Twitter is ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites.

Twitter is especially very successful because of the openness of the APIs. Rumours are that there is more traffic to the APIs than traffic to the twitter.com website. This kind of traffic is probably never measured by companies such as Hitwise, Alexa, Compete or Quantcast (see this previous post for several traffic graphs for Twitter).

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise finishes her post with Whilst Twitter continues to be a niche website, it also continues to enjoy strong growth. At the same time Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb writes in a post titled Early Stats Show Twitter Taking Off in Japan : The signs are that Japanese Twitter usage is set to explode in popularity. .... Could Japan be the first country where Twitter usage becomes mainstream, rather than just being popular among geeks - as it is in the US and english speaking countries? Judging by these early stats, that's a good bet!

Is Twitter still a niche or is it becoming mainstream ? We'll have to wait a little bit to figure this out.

Twistory

2008-04-28T17:55:00.002+02:00

Twistory is a brand new Twitter mashup. Twistory allows you to visualize your Twitter archive in your calendar. The name Twistory refers both to Twitter and history. Tijs Vrolix, the guy behind Twistory, sees Twistory not as a new Twitter client, rather as a way to browse your own (and perhaps a small number of friends) Twitter archive.

Twistory is already been featured on TechCrunch, so it got already a lot of attention in the blogosphere and of course also in the twitosphere. If you want a beta invite, you can always ask Tijs.

1 million Twitter users according to Twitdir

2008-04-28T00:17:00.002+02:00

Twitdir finally reported more than 1 million Twitter users, see the screenshot below.

I have been tracking the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir for a while.

On January 6, 2008, I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million public uers before April 1, 2008. Around mid February it seemed that the Twitter user base was growing faster than I expected. In the beginning of March however the growth slowed down.

The author of Twitdir announced last week on the Twitdir blog a new algorithm to follow the growth of Twitter users. This lead to an increase in the speed of Twitter users detected, as can be seen from on the graph below.

The reported slown down (around March 2008) is probably due to the old algorithm of Twitdir and not caused by a slowdown in the number of new Twitter users.

Steve Ballmer on Facebook

2008-04-25T19:43:00.001+02:00

Well, this post isn't about Twitter, but I'd like to share it with the readers of this blog.

Microsoft Belgium organized yesterday the Mix Essentials event, where Belgian developers and designers could get a glance at the offerings Microsoft presented at MIX08. During the Mix Essentials event, Microsoft organised a press conference with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Several bloggers were also invited at this press conference, including me. I had the opportunity to question Steve Ballmer on his experiences with social networks. A fellow blogger filmed my question and Steve Ballmer's answer - see the embedded movie below. Steve Ballmer confirmed that he has a "real" profile on Facebook, the one with the photo where he's hitting a golf ball. Steve Ballmer did not say anything on Twitter, not during the press conference and not during his keynote speech later that day. It seems to me extremely unlikely that he is behind one of the currently three Steve Ballmers accounts on Twitter.

The story that the real Steve Ballmer can be found on Facebook is currently making its tour on the Internet : e.g. ValleyWag and Reuters.

Twitter Account and Followers For Sale

2008-04-14T18:47:00.002+02:00

Andrew Baron really loves his Twitter account, but he feels like he hasn't been using it the way he wants to. Instead of deleting his account, he decided it to sell on Ebay.

The latest bid is currently 1,125.00 USD. As Andrew Baron currently has 1,636 followers, this means that each follower is valuated at 0.69 USD.

The problem is that buying followers is like buying air. What do you really know about the followers of a Twitter account ? Can the buyer be sure that the information followers put in their profiles is correct ? Furthermore, what would the buyer be able to do with a list of followers from a bought Twitter account ? Are the followers part of the target audience for the goods or services you want to sell ? Will the buyer be able to sell something to them ? Can the buyer convert them into paying subscribers of whatever service ? Will the followers click on the ads on the buyers's site ? Will the followers remain followers or will they abandon ?

Will Ebay allow this sale of a digital good ? Will Twitter delete this account when the sale effectively takes place ? Who will be the next one to sell his Twitter account ?

There are clearly more questions than answers.

Twitter Traffic and Twitter Buzz

2008-04-10T00:21:00.004+02:00

As the number of Twitter accounts seems to increase steadily - it is very likely that Twitter currently has over 1 million users - I had a look at various sources that could give an indication whether the traffic to Twitter's website is going up (or down) and whether the buzz in the blogosphere is going up (or down).

Is Twitter traffic going up ?

Alexa : worldwide traffic measured by the Alexa toolbar installed by users (only for Internet Explorer)

Compete : estimated site traffic based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users.

Quantcast : US traffic statistics obtained by panel estimates and direct measurements

Is Twitter buzz going up ?

Google Trends : search terms and news volume

BlogPulse : a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere

Technorati : a blog search engine currently tracking 112.8 million blogs

Icerocket : another blog search engine

Trendpedia : another blog trend tracker

Although the presented graphs differ in the definition of the metrics and have different timescales, I have the impression that the trends are going up. The future looks bright for Twitter. The question remains what Twitter's business model will be. As the increased traffic will undoubtly cause additional investments by Twitter Inc., it is completely unclear for Twitter users where Twitter Inc. gets its income.

Twitter id's and number of Twitter users

2008-04-01T00:18:00.004+02:00

A comment on the previous post (1 million Twitter users) stated that "there are already a lot more than 12 million accounts on Twitter". The proof of this statement is given by information grabbed from the Twitterholic site.

Each Twitter account has its own Twitter id. You can easily find your own Twitter id by looking at the URL for the RSS feed for your Twitter account. In the early days of Twitter, Twitter id's were sequentially attributed. This made it easy to track the number of total Twitter accounts created (not necessary the number of active Twitter accounts). Jason Kottke published almost a year ago an article based on such stats.

Because of the growing popularity of Twitter, the Twitter developers decided to change the policy of generating Twitter id's by the end of November 2006. From that moment on there were gaps between the id's actually used. Assuming that the Twitter id of a new created Twitter account is equal the total number of Twitter accounts does not seem correct to me. The exact number of Twitter accounts created until now (and the number of active Twitter accounts) is only known by the people at Twitter Inc. And they haven't disclosed it until now ...

By the way, currently it is not possible to register Twitter names containing spaces. In the early days it was possible to register such Twitter names. Some of these names are still in use, e.g. twitter.com/there you go.

1 million Twitter users

2008-03-30T22:57:00.002+02:00

On January 6, 2008, I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million public uers before April 1, 2008. Twitdir reports the number of public Twitter users it has detected. Around mid February it seemed that the Twitter user base was growing faster than I expected. In the beginning of March however the growth slowed down. This reduced growth has continued until now, see the graph below.

If this reduced growth continues at the same speed, the 1 million mark of public Twitter users according to Twitdir will be reached only around June 2008. There is no explanation why the growth of the Twitter user base suddenly changed from 3,500 new users per day to 750 new users per day.

As mentioned in one of the previous posts on this blog, the number of private Twitter users could be around 15%. This implies that the total number of Twitter accounts at this very moment already exceeds 1 million.

ilist

2008-03-29T15:31:00.002+01:00

ilist is another nice (and brand new) application letting you manage your to do list with Twitter.

There is no need to signup. By sending Twitter messages to @ilist, you build up your to do list. Your list can be viewed (and managed) at ilist.

Twitter Visualizations

2008-03-13T18:08:00.000+01:00

The FlowingData blog has a very nice overview of 17 ways to visualize the Twitter Universe. One of these 17 ways is a graph I created almost a year ago mapping all friend relationships of the Belgian Twitter users.

The hype of the Twittering Plants

2008-03-12T00:04:00.002+01:00

From February 24, 2007 several newssites and blogs reported about how Botanicalls made it possible for plants to Twitter. Probably Makezine was one of first sites reporting this news.

Botanicalls is a project concerning communications between plants and people. Each plant on the Botanicalls system is equipped with sensors. The hardware connected to the sensors is able to determine when a human intervention is needed. This human intervention can be requested by a phone call automatically generated by the hardware and software. Now the sensors can be connected to a computer generating Twitter messages. Hopefully these Twitter messages are read by someone who can come to apply the requested action, probably adding water.

On the Botanicalls site detailed instructions can be found on how to set up the system. You need a plant, a little bit of hardware (e.g. transistors, resistors, led, wires, nails), an Arduino board, a computer, a little bit of software, (the Arduino environment and the Botanicalls Twitter Code) and finally a Twitter account.

There has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere and in the twitosphere.

Despite all this buzz, I only found 3 Twitter accounts presumably from a twittering plant.
twitter.com/pothos
twitter.com/pothos_etech08
twitter.com/faludi

The people at Botanicalls are interested in the experiences of others setting up Twitter accounts for plants that need water. They ask that experimenters would upload photos of their setup on Flickr with the tag: Botanicalls_Twitter. Currently there is only one such photo on Flickr.

Conclusion. A lot of people have picked up the news. Some have ordered the hardware. Only very few people actually connected the hardware yet to their plants. In the meantime Twitter users had an interesting topic to discuss in the twitosphere.

PS I am wondering why the people at Botanicalls did not consider to link to sensors to an automated watering device.

Growth of number of Twitter users according to Twitdir

2008-03-06T19:40:00.002+01:00

A while ago I predicted that Twitter would have 1 million users before April 1, 2008. The source for the number of (public) Twitter users is Twitdir. Twitdir reports on its homepage the total number of Twitter users detected.

I observed a spectacular slowdown in the growth of the Twitter users reported by Twitdir. See the graph below.

Is the growth really slowing down ? Or is Twitdir not able to catch up ?

Kosovo and Serbia in Twitter

2008-02-18T23:03:00.001+01:00

Last Sunday Kosovo declared its indepence from Serbia. It is not that often that a new country declares its independence, especially in Europe. I had a look at the Twitter activity in Kosovo and in Serbia.

A lot of Twitter users are twittering about Kosovo, especially newsfeeds are publishing numerous article refering to Kosovo. Have a look at the trendgraph produced by Twittermeter for Kosovo.

The question I had was how many Twitter users might be present in this new country ? According to Twitter itself there are 6 users in Kosovo, Twitdir is able to find 5 users in Kosovo, and finally Terraminds finds 3 users in Kosovo. Looking a little bit deeper it looks that there are 8 different Twitter accounts in Kosovo :
twitter.com/albani
twitter.com/dreni
twitter.com/fisi
twitter.com/frakton
twitter.com/kosovo
twitter.com/nikaj
twitter.com/singfiel
twitter.com/xhakli

For a country of 2,2 million people (figures from 2005), there is a Twitter user acount for every 275,000 inhabitants.

In Serbia there are clearly more Twitter users. Twitter reports 74 Twitter users for Serbia, Twitdir reports 63 Twitter user, Terraminds reports 56 Twitter user. Combining these sources and further analysis gives me a total of 120 Twitter users in Serbia. For a population op 7.5 million people, this implies a Twitter user account for every 62,500 inhabitants. For Iceland, a tiny island with 300,000 inhabitants the Twitter user density is 3,725, for Australia the Twitter user density is 5,823.

It looks like the people of Kosovo have currently other things on their mind then registering themselves on Twitter and publishing Twitter messages. I can image that for quite a lot of people in Kosovo it is currently party time. Other people are perhaps protesting against the declaration of independence.

Twitdir Tops

2008-02-16T20:43:00.002+01:00

If you are curious to find how many followers, followed, updates or favorties you need to have to be amongst the top Twitterers, you can take a look at Twitdir Tops.

If your Twitter account follows more than 7054 other Twitter users, if your Twitter account is being followed by more than 6499 other Twitter users, if youphave published more than 81077 Twitter messages and finally if you favorited more than 16388 Twitter messages, you can consider your Twitter account as a really "top" account.

Twitter userbase growing faster than expected

2008-02-12T00:36:00.000+01:00

On January 6, 2008 I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million users (with a public profile) before April 1, 2008.

I have been tracking since then the number of Twitter users as reported by Twitdir. It looks like Twitter's userbase is growing faster than initially estimated. The dotted line on the graph below shows the estimated growth, the solid line the actual number of Twitter users. I have no doubt that the 1 million user mark will be reached before March 1, 2008.

Twittermeter

2008-02-07T00:13:00.001+01:00

Twittermeter is one of these new launched Twitter tools. Twittermeter lets you query an index of all the words that have been sent to Twitter's public timeline since Twittermeter started gathering them on 6 November 2007 and plot the number of times that word was used over time.

Let's have a look at the results for "kerviel", the name of the French trader responsible for the loss of almost 5 billion EURO at Société Générale bank in France (see also this blogpost for the link between Kerviel and Twitter).

Comparing the results of Twittermeter with the number of Twitter messages found by Terraminds Twitter Search, I have the impression that Twittermeter is not capturing the same number of messages as found by Terraminds.

I do like the interface of Twittermeter. Let's hope that Twittermeter will soon index more messages from the Twitter public timeline.

First state of the Twitosphere in Australia

2008-02-04T22:36:00.000+01:00

Twitter is used in almost every country on this globe, including in the countries down under. This time I will share some figures concerning the twitosphere in Australia.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 3641 active Twitter accounts from Australia. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Australia if the location explicitely refers to Australia or if the Twitter user was located in Australia according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Australian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 21.2 million people (according to Wikipedia), Australia has 3641 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Australian Twitter account for every 5,823 inhabitants.

History of the Australian Twitter accounts
The graph below shows the history of the Australian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Australian Twitter accounts.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Australia
http://twitter.com/dataphage - dataphage - first message on 20/07/2006
http://twitter.com/sailor - Wilson - first message on 10/08/2006
http://twitter.com/sinisterfrog - sinisterfrog - first message on 26/08/2006
http://twitter.com/celia141 - Celia - first message on 27/08/2006
http://twitter.com/jngo - John - first message on 9/09/2006

Public of Private
336 Twitter acounts from Australia or 9.2% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 17% of the Australian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Australia follows 24 Twitter accounts.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/dan7 - Daniel - 3.460 following
http://twitter.com/grum - Chris Barraud - 2.110 following
http://twitter.com/JINXIE - Jacinta Gascoigne - 1.853 following
http://twitter.com/petendonna - Peter & Donna - 1.180 following
http://twitter.com/problogger - Darren Rowse - 906 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 8% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Australia has 26 followers.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/Ed_Dale - Ed Dale - 1.992 followers
http://twitter.com/dan7 - Daniel - 1.634 followers
http://twitter.com/Kitta - Kitta - 1.606 followers
http://twitter.com/problogger - Darren Rowse - 1.474 followers
http://twitter.com/duncanriley - Duncan Riley - 1.063 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Australia are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Australia has 213 updates.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/aflbot - aflbot - 11.645 updates
http://twitter.com/Tuna - Gary Barber - 11.634 updates
http://twitter.com/andrewbarnett - andrew barnett - 11.560 updates
http://twitter.com/baggygreen - baggygreen - 10.510 updates
http://twitter.com/jjprojects - John Johnston - 10.057 updates

Tweet frequency
The tweet frequency is the average number of Twitter messages - also called Tweets - a Twitter users produces on a single day. I did only consider the Twitter users who have posted messages over a periode longer than 30 days.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/baggygreen - baggygreen - 152,32 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/cmail_breaking - CourierMail Breaking - 74,31 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/aflbot - aflbot - 36,97 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/1000Monkeys - 1000Monkeys - 35,38 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/jjprojects - John Johnston - 31,63 tweets/day

Degree of activity
48% of all Twitter accounts from Australia with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

34% of all Twitter accounts from Australia with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive.

Conclusion
This state of the Australian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Australia were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). From November 2006 the number of users increased at an higher rate. From April 2007 the growth in the Australian twitosphere accelerated further. The growth remained at the same speed from April 2007 until now.

The penetration of the number of Twitter users in Australia is very high compared to other countries previously analyzed, only Iceland - with a very small Twitter community - has an higher penetration.

The hunt for Jérôme Kerviel

2008-01-28T00:40:00.000+01:00

Jérôme Kerviel is the trader at Société Générale responsible for the loss of almost 5 billion EURO or 7.2 billion USD. He is taken into custody by the French police. Journalists and bloggers have started a worldwide hunt for information on him.

A Wikipedia article describes in detail his professional career at SocGen. A photo of Jérôme Kerviel was first published in a blogpost from the Fincancial Times. His CV has been published on several news sites, including the Telegraph. According to the Guardian Jérôme Kerviel lost almost all his friends on Facebook. At this moment his Facebook account is not accessible anymore. Several fake accounts have been created. Luckely for Jérôme Kerviel, not everyone is attacking him. Different fan groups have been created on Facebook to support him.

Jérôme Kerviel does not seem to have a Twitter account. Twitter users are informing each other on their progress on finding information on him, directly in Twitter messages or indirectly by announcing posts on their blogs. His hotmail email account (listed in the CV) seems to be invalid, you cannot add this email address anymore to your MSN contacts (as found by this Twitter user). Another Twitter user says he has found Jérôme Kerviel's address and even his mobile phone number (see this tweet).

On the one hand Web 2.0 allows users to look up information on all kind op topics. The scary thing however is that in case of a sudden event, information about an individual person can be found, revealing personal information that is taken out of its context. E.g. what is the relationship between "ambitious judo teacher" and this fraud case ?

First state of the Twitosphere in Iceland

2008-01-20T16:14:00.001+01:00

Last week check legend Bobby Fischer died in his new home country Iceland. At the same time I was wondering why Iceland had so many Twitter users. For an estimated population of 312,872 (Wikipedia article) I was able to find 84 Twitter accounts, resulting in a Twitter account for every 3,725 inhabitants.

Let's have a closer look at the twitosphere in Iceland.

History of the Twitter accounts in Iceland
This graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts in Iceland. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts in Iceland.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Iceland
http://twitter.com/briansuda - Brian Suda - first message on 22/11/2006
http://twitter.com/gusti - Gusti - first message on 29/12/2006
http://twitter.com/rosastef - Rosastef - first message on 8/01/2007
http://twitter.com/Kiddi - Kristinn Agnarsson - first message on 27/01/2007
http://twitter.com/kjarri - Kjartan Albertsson - first message on 28/01/2007

Public of Private
13 Twitter acounts from Iceland or 15.5% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 23% of the Twitter accounts in Iceland do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Iceland follows 21 Twitter users.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/bjork - bjork - 992 following
http://twitter.com/Kalli - Kalli - 102 following
http://twitter.com/briansuda - Brian Suda - 92 following
http://twitter.com/oskuskaktus - Ósk Gunnlaugsdóttir - 71 following
http://twitter.com/salvor - Salvör - 60 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 24% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Iceland has 15 followers.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/briansuda - Brian Suda - 371 followers
http://twitter.com/bjork - bjork - 243 followers
http://twitter.com/Kalli - Kalli - 112 followers
http://twitter.com/oskuskaktus - Ósk Gunnlaugsdóttir - 57 followers
http://twitter.com/salvor - Salvör - 45 followers

Updates
4% of the accounts from Iceland are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Iceland has 135 updates.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/Kalli - Kalli - 4,058 updates
http://twitter.com/Fk1710 - Frida Kjartansdottir - 1,551 updates
http://twitter.com/briansuda - Brian Suda - 927 updates
http://twitter.com/hthth - Hrafn Th. Th. - 575 updates
http://twitter.com/imoxxx - imo - 497 updates

Tweet frequency
The tweet frequency is the average number of Twitter messages - also called Tweets - a Twitter users produces on a single day. In the list below I have only taken the Twitter users into account who have posted at one message in the last 30 days.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/Kalli - Kalli - 13,18 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/imoxxx - imo - 8,15 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/hthth - Hrafn Th. Th. - 4,83 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/briansuda - Brian Suda - 2,19 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/oskuskaktus - Ósk Gunnlaugsdóttir - 1,76 tweets/day

Degree of activity
58% of all Twitter accounts from Iceland with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

30% of all Twitter accounts from Iceland with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive.

Conclusion
This state of the Twitosphere in Iceland is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Iceland is an country complete surrounded by water. At the same time Iceland is the most developed country (Wikipedia article). Users from Iceland were rather late to discover Twitter (from November 2006). From February 2007 the twitosphere in Iceland grew in a linear way. This results in a very high penetration - compared to other (larger) countries.

The usage patterns shown above are similar to the usage patterns for other countries for which I analyzed the twitosphere (see the sidebar for a list of these countries). The Twitter users from Iceland are strongly linked to Twitter users in other countries such as the USA, the UK and Canada. The most followed Twitter account from Iceland is http://twitter.com/GunnarHafdal, someone from Denmark.

It will remain a question where the Twitter community in Iceland with currently around 30 active Twitter users is large enough to survive.

Twitter Technology Blog

2008-01-17T22:53:00.001+01:00

The guys at Twitter started their blog more than a year ago (more precisely in ~~August 2008~~ August 2006). Now they just launched another blog, the Twitter Technology Blog (dev.twitter.com). The developers at Twitter wanted a place to talk in more detail about what's going on under the hood at Twitter. If you are writing an application that talks to the Twitter API or if you are just curious about code, tools, and practices used by the Twitter developers, it might be a good idea to add this blog to your list of blogs in your favorite feedreader.

What's the cost of Twitter ?

2008-01-10T19:36:00.000+01:00

According to this post from Pat Phelan and Florian Seroussi from Roam4free Twitter would cost the economy around $13,5 billion in 2008. Let's have a look at their assumptions.

750.000 registered users
Today Twitdir reported 753.629 users. These are only Twitter users with a public profile. Twitter users with a private profile (estimated at 15%) have to be added, giving 866.673 users.

450.000 active users
Based on a large number of Twitter users analyzed, I did find out that 45% did not post a single message over the last 30 days, 40% did post at least one message in the last 7 days. 40% of 866.673 gives 346.669 active users.

As I sometimes use Twitdir (and other sources) to look for Twitter users for a geographical location, I regularly encounter Twitter users that do not exist anymore. Twitdir seems to catch (hopefully all) new Twitter users. Twitdir however does not seem to catch all abandoners. So the figure of 346.669 active Twitter users is too high. If the number of dead accounts is 15%, we finally end up with about 300.000 active users at this moment.

60.000 new users each month
In a recent previous post I showed a graph with the growth of the number of Twitter users. Currently there are daily over 3300 new Twitter users according tot Twitdir, resulting in 100.000 new Twitter users each month.

As said before, the number of deleted Twitter accounts is unknown. I guess that Twitter users who are not interested anymore in using Twitter do not always make the effort to actually delete their accounts. They rather leave their accounts alive, but do not post new messages nor read messages from other Twitter users. They belong to the large group of sleeping accounts. Let's suppose that the number of sleeping accounts outnumbers the number of deleted accounts.

Number of messages
The author of Tweetscan announced a while ago on his blog that Tweetscan is capturing almost 100% of all public Twitter messages. Unfortunately he did not mention how many messages Tweetscan is capturing.

In June 2007 I wrote a post to announce that Twitterment (a Twitter search engine that is currently not available anymore) detected 25.000 messages per day. As the number of Twitter users has doubled since June 2007, the number of messages will probably be higher. A safe bet is at least two to four times : 50.000 - 100.000 messages per day.

Another way of looking at Twitter activity is looking at the average number of messages per Twitter account. The average number of messages for the data I collected is 253. Only 5% of the Twitter users have produced more than 800 messages. It is also interesting to have a look at the tweet frequency, the number of Twitter messages written per day. On average the tweet frequency is 2,15 (messages per day). 5% of the Twitter users write on average more than 6 messages per day. Several of the Twitter accounts with an high tweet frequency are non-human, the messages are automatically generated (e.g. news feeds).

27 minutes per day
This amount of time seems reasonable for a heavy Twitter user, with an high tweet frequency. Not all Twitter users are heavy Twitter users, implying that 27 minutes per day is too high.

$20/hour
Although this may seem a fair productivity cost, it is probably only valid for developed countries such as the USA, Canada, the UK or Germany. Wages and labour cost in other countries are much lower. What is the average labour cost for Africa - where there is also a (very small) Twitter user base ? What is the average labour cost for South American countries such as Mexico, Brazil and Argentina with also thousands of Twitter users ?

100%
I do not agree that 100% of all Twitter activity has to be considered as a (complete) waste of time.
- Not everyone is using Twitter during work hours. Already a lot of companies are blocking Twitter forcing their employees to postpone their Twitter activities until they are at home.
- There is practical usage of Twitter, even within a business context, e.g. Remember the milk.
- Monitoring Twitter can be part of someone's job. I personally know several persons who make their living as a web developer, web consultant, social media consultant, online marketing consultant, ... This kind of job implies that you have to keep in touch with recent trends, for instance while using Twitter.

If the cost of Twitter usage to the economy would really reach $13,5 billion in a single year, which company would be interested in buying Twitter ? Especially if the companies who incur these productivity losses would try to sue Twitter for compensations.

Number of Twitter users

2008-01-06T00:48:00.000+01:00

One reliable source for the number of Twitter users is Twitdir. Twitdir reports the number of Twitter it already discovered on its homepage. As Twitdir is only capable of detecting Twitter users with a public profile, this number is a underestimation of the total number of Twitter users. I have been following the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir for a couple of months by now. I made a graph showing the number of Twitter users according to Twitdir over the last seven months.

I want to make one prediction for 2007, more specifically regarding the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir. I expect this number to reach 1 million before April 1, 2008.

By the way, as the percentage of Twitter users with a private profile is sometimes estimated at 10% to 15% Twitter will reach 1 million users even sooner, probably around March 1, 2008.

Twitter stats

2008-01-05T22:47:00.000+01:00

If you are curious to have a look at some statistics about your own Twitter activity, have a look at the Twitter Stats package developed by Damon Cortesi. The original script only works on Mac, but there are several other versions available now, including a web version. The full code is also available on a Google Code page.

If you happen to use a Mac, concise instructions to obtain your stats are available here.

Most popular Twitter bookmarks on del.icio.us

2007-12-29T20:41:00.001+01:00

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where users can share their bookmarks. Six months ago I already posted an overview of the number of del.icio.us bookmarks for Twitter related URLs (Twitter itself, Twitter tools, Twitter gadgets, Twitter blogs, ...).

I just had a look at the number of bookmarks for these Twitter related URLs. The list below shows the 10 most popular Twitter related URLs according to the number of del.icio.us bookmarks.

Twittervision : 2866 bookmarks, first bookmark on March 17, 2007

Twitterific : 899 bookmarks, first bookmark on January 15, 2007

Twitter Fan Wiki : 893 bookmarks, first bookmark on November 20, 2006

Twitterfeed : 778 bookmarks, first bookmark on March 22, 2007

Twitbin : 563 bookmarks, first bookmark on May 4, 2007

Foamee : 401 bookmarks, first bookmark on November 9, 2007

Twitthis : 396 bookmarks, first bookmark on March 22, 2007

Snitter : 372 bookmarks, first bookmark on September 4, 2007

Terraminds micro search : 341 bookmarks, first bookmark on Augustus 20, 2007

Twitterposter : 327 bookmarks, first bookmark on October 31, 2007

Do you agree that this list is a true representation of the most popular Twitter tools ?

First State of the Twitosphere in India

2007-12-26T23:08:00.000+01:00

I published already several blogposts on this blog analyzing the Twitosphere is several European and South American countries (see the sidebar). Last week I had a close look at the twitosphere in Canada. The next country analyzed - the first country in Asia - is India.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 1631 active Twitter accounts in India. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from India if the location explicitely refers to India or if the Twitter user was located in India according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Twitter users in India is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For an estimated population of 1.12 billion people (according to Wikipedia), India has 1631 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Twitter account in India for every 687,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for less then 10,000 inhabitants. For Canada there is a Twitter account for every 10,014 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in India
This graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts in India. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts in India.

Oldest Twitter accounts from India
http://twitter.com/pajama - Pajama Pockets - first message on 28/07/2006
http://twitter.com/harshadsharma - Harshad Sharma - first message on 2/08/2006
http://twitter.com/Kalyan - Kalyan Sagar - first message on 14/08/2006
http://twitter.com/hardik - Hardik Shah - first message on 27/08/2006
http://twitter.com/Dolly - Dolly - first message on 31/08/2006

Public of Private
257 Twitter acounts from India or 15.8% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium). In Canada 7.1% of the Twitter accounts were private accounts.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 36% of the Twitter accounts in India do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from India follows 10 Twitter users. An average Canadian Twitter account follows 23 Twitters accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy).

Top 5
http://twitter.com/vijay - Vijay - 1,435 following
http://twitter.com/Gauravonomics - Gaurav Mishra - 972 following
http://twitter.com/GharExpert - GharExpert - 799 following
http://twitter.com/regalfinance - regalfinance - 635 following
http://twitter.com/RaviKarandeekar - Ravi Karandeekar - 521 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 25% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from India has 8 followers. This average is far below the average for Canada (25 followers).

Top 5
http://twitter.com/Gauravonomics - Gaurav Mishra - 276 followers
http://twitter.com/drmani - Dr Mani - 247 followers
http://twitter.com/labnol - Amit Agarwal - 213 followers
http://twitter.com/kiruba - Kiruba Shankar - 208 followers
http://twitter.com/abdulqabiz - Abdul Qabiz - 176 followers

Updates
10% of the accounts from India are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from India has 88 updates. This is again significantly lower than the average for the Canadian twitosphere. The top 2 Twitter accounts are non human, meaning that the messages are automatically generated. In other countries I discovered more automated Twitter accounts.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/indianews - India News - 39,831 updates
http://twitter.com/PHP_programmer - onlinejobsforall.com - 10,053 updates
http://twitter.com/bluepotion - Manasa Malipeddi - 2,224 updates
http://twitter.com/aalaap - Aalaap Ghag - 1,827 updates
http://twitter.com/prsn - Prasoon - 1,756 updates

Degree of activity
60% of all Twitter accounts from India with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts. In Canada the percentage of inactive Twitter accounts was 46%.

27% of all Twitter accounts from India with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. In Canada the percentage of active Twitter accounts was 38%.

Conclusion
This state of the Twitosphere in India is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from India were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). From March 2007 the growth in the twitosphere in India accelerated. The growth of new Twitter user accounts in India remained at the same speed from March 2007 until now.

The degree of activity in the twitosphere in India is lower than in the other analyzed countries. The percentage of active Twitter users, the number of Twitters users followed and being followed, the number of updates (Twitter messages published), the number of non human Twitter accounts are all significantly lower compared to Canada and several European countries.

For a country with a huge population (estimated at 1.12 billion), the number of Twitter users is surprisingly low. Especially because India is known for its IT workforce. There are a lot of IT specialists from India working in the USA and in Europe. I have the impression that the IT workforce within India does not use Twitter to communicate intensively with their colleagues working abroad.

Tweeterboard

2007-12-19T22:01:00.001+01:00

Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations with other Twitter users. Services showing how many followers a Twitter user has and how many Twitter users a Twitter user is following have been around a long time. Examples of these services are Twitterholic, Twitterposter, Twitdir and Terraminds Twitter Search.

The basic idea of Tweeterboard is that conversations - which Twitter user talks to other Twitter users - is according to the people behind Tweeterboard a better measure of influence and engagement than followers, friends and update frequency. The reputation of a Twitter user is calculated based on who talks (links) to this user. Tweeterboard is currently aware of about 2600 users, of which 1500 or so are active Twitter users with public updates.

You can have a look at the top 100 list published by Tweeterboard. This list is still pretty volatile.

Tweeterboard has implemented a very interesting concept, although it is unclear how the metrics are derived. As soon as there is more clarity in how the metrics are calculated, it is quite likely that some Twitter users will try to score high in the ranking (using SEO-like tactics).

2600 users is only a small subset of the complete twitosphere. Twitdir reported today 685,000 Twitters users with a public profile. As shown in a previous post on this blog a long tail effect can be observed in the twitosphere. Only a small subset of users have high values for the traditional metrics (following, followers, updates).

Twitter users have sometimes good reasons to keep their messages private. Twitter offers the possibilty to its users to declare their account private. Only accepted users are able to read the messages of private Twitter accounts. The private nature of a specific Twitter account does not exclude that this Twitter user can be very influential within his community of followers. Tweeterboard is only able to trace the public influence of Twitter users. Replies from public Twitter accounts to messages from private Twitter accounts are captured. The original messages however remain inaccessible to Tweeterboard.

Twitter is a global community. At the same time there are numerous subcommunities within the global twitosphere. Each of these subcommunities has its own dynamics. You can get an idea of this dynamics by browsing thru the different states of the twitosphere by country I already published on this blog (see the side bar). The subcommunities - often by topic, by language or by country - have members who are also connected to other subcommunities, resulting in subcommunities that are often interlinked. Examples of subcommunities are the Twitter users from the Netherlands (see which Twitter users TwitterNL is following), the Twitter users from Argentina (see Tuitiar), the Spanish speaking Twitter users (see TuitHispana), the Twitter users from Madrid (see Twittmad).

It would be interesting to see the influence rankings not only on a global level - as presented on the current top 100 page - but also by subcommunity. Companies only active in a specific geographical location (a continent, a country or even on a lower level) are not always interested in who's influential on Twitter on a global scale, but rather on who's influential with their geographical location and perhaps also domain of activity. It will be a real challenge to draw clear boundaries around subcommunities.

One final remark, the developers of Tweeterboard still have to fix some loose ends. While trying to find out the metrics for specific users (within my subcommunity), I sometimes got error messages.

First state of the Twitosphere in Canada

2007-12-18T22:56:00.000+01:00

I published already several blogposts on this blog analyzing the Twitosphere is several European and South American countries (see the sidebar). The next country analyzed is Canada.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 3307 active Twitter accounts from Canada. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Canada if the location explicitely refers to Canada or if the Twitter user was located in Canada according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Canadian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 33.126 million people (according to Wikipedia), Canada has 3307 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Canadian Twitter account for every 10,014 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for less then 10,000 inhabitants.

History of the Canadian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Canadian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Canadian Twitter accounts.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Canada
http://twitter.com/Dick - Dick - first message on 13/07/2006
http://twitter.com/astroboy - astro - first message on 14/07/2006
http://twitter.com/velkr0 - velkr0 - first message on 16/07/2006
http://twitter.com/sonson - sonson - first message on 17/07/2006
http://twitter.com/SteveDinn - Steve Dinn - first message on 17/07/2006

Public of Private
Only 234 Twitter acounts from Canada or 7.1% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium).

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 16% of the Canadian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Canada follows 23 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy).

Top 5
http://twitter.com/Tolchock - Maki - 2.473 following
http://twitter.com/ambermacarthur - amber mac - 1.560 following
http://twitter.com/lisamac - Lisa McMillan - 937 following
http://twitter.com/trishussey - Tris Hussey - 920 following
http://twitter.com/MatthewDaniels - Matthew Daniels - 795 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 7% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Canada has 25 followers. This average is in line with the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy).

Top 5
http://twitter.com/ambermacarthur - amber mac - 3.639 followers
http://twitter.com/snookca - Snook - 1.171 followers
http://twitter.com/lisamac - Lisa McMillan - 840 followers
http://twitter.com/mezzoblue - Dave Shea - 826 followers
http://twitter.com/willpate - Will Pate - 815 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Canada are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Canada has 188 updates, which is higher than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). The analysis for the European countries was done several months ago. The averages have probably increased by now.

The relatively high average number of updates can be explained by several very active Twitter accounts. Some of them are from a human twitterer, others however are from an automated source. 50% of the Twitter users in Canada had less then 34 updates.

Top 5 human twitterers
http://twitter.com/definetheline - Michael Mistretta - 9.366 updates
http://twitter.com/Chris24 - Chris Thomson - 9.254 updates
http://twitter.com/bunneh - bunneh - 4.704 updates
http://twitter.com/darylcognito - daryl n cognito - 4.556 updates
http://twitter.com/ChadOhman - Chad Ohman - 4.467 updates

Top 5 non human twitterers
~~http://twitter.com/mylesb - Myles Braithwaite - 54.632 updates~~
http://twitter.com/WTL_iTunes - WTL's iTunes - 19.529 updates
http://twitter.com/globeandmail - globeandmail - 5.367 updates
http://twitter.com/Vancouver_News - Vancouver News - 5.050 updates
http://twitter.com/hfx_ben - ben tremblay - 3.344 updates

Degree of activity
46% of all Twitter accounts from Canada with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

38% of all Twitter accounts from Canada with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive.

Conclusion
This state of the Canadian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Canada were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). From November 2006 the number of users increased at an higher rate. From April 2007 the growth in the Canadian twitosphere accelerated further. The growth of new Twitter user accounts in Canada slowed a little bit down afterwards. Surprisingly the growth remained at the same speed from June 2007 until now.

Twittering for a good cause

2007-12-14T01:07:00.000+01:00

Bart Dewaele, one of the Twitter Stars of Belgium, is selling his next tweet, number 3000, to the highest bidder.

The money Bart will raise with the sale of this special tweet will go to the music for life initiative of Studio Brussel, a Belgian radio station and the Red Cross. This year the music for life initiative pays attention to the lack of drink water for too many people on this planet.

Currently the highest bid is 400 euros or 587 US dollars.

Club140

2007-12-06T21:34:00.000+01:00

Dave Winner launched club140. He is keeping track of people he follows who have posted "perfect" Twitter messages, ones that are exactly 140 characters long. If you want to be part of the game, send David Winer a direct message and he will probably follow you.

Twitter for business

2007-11-22T23:36:00.000+01:00

Twitter is at the same time a communication channel and a social network.

After using Twitter several months now and watching the discussion on Twitter in the blogosphere, on forums, within Linkedin Questions and Answers, I would like to present my 2 cents how the two purposes of Twitter can be used in a business context.

Distinction has to be made between the usage of Twitter by a company and the usage of Twitter by a professional, an individual in a professional context.

Opportunities for companies to consider Twitter

publish links to interesting information published by the company: e.g. company info, but also news feeds, weather feeds
use Twitter as a backchannel to collect feedback e.g. on products and services of the company or on presentations during an event
promote services or products
announce deals & opportunities
improve ranking of company websites in search results of search engines

Opportunities for indivuals working for companies to consider Twitter

publish links to information you've published elsewhere, e.g. on your blog
expand your network
listen to what other professionals in your domain are twittering
increase your market value by showing your knowledge, experience, vision, ... on specific work-related subjects
improve your ranking in search results of search engines

Twitterposter

2007-11-07T23:07:00.000+01:00

Twitterposter's purpose is to visually represent the degree of influence that Twitter users have, where influence is measured as the number of followers.

There was initially only a global picture, afterwards several localized versions per country were launched : United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, France, Taiwan, China, Netherlands, Mexico, Philippines, Argentina, Singapore.

Twitterposter - only launched very recently, the URL was registered on October 29, 2007 - got in a very short time a lot of attention in the blogosphere : 264 saves in del.icio.us - the first one only on November 1, 457 blog reactions according to Technorati, traffic rank 20,631 according to Alexa.

The reactions on Twitterposter are mixed. Some find it very interesting, other however are less positive.

Mashable : TwitterPoster: Useless But Cool : It is an interesting way to spend a few minutes, and survey who the heavy hitters are in the Twittersphere

TechCrunch : Twitter Poster Is Pretty, But Probably Not Much Else : It’s a pretty mashup, but the usefulness of it isn’t clear. I’ve already seen folks on Twitter talking about why some people have bigger profile pictures than others, and how they can change this, so it might have the potential of becoming a Technorati-style top list for Twitter users, but aside from this its just nice eye candy.

I have to agree, the pictures are pretty and their usefulness seems rather limited.

I see one major problem. The pictures are based on incomplete data, especially the pictures for the individuals countries. The least popular Twitter account on the Twitterposter picture for the Netherlands - containing 304 Dutch Twitter users - has four followers. In the state of the Dutch twitosphere published on this blog on August 22 I already reported that there were over 2000 Twitter accounts in the Netherlands. The 304th Twitter user in the Twitterfacts list compiled in August 2007 had already 30 followers ...

Twitter Trends

2007-11-05T21:51:00.000+01:00

I just had a look at the information Google Trends presents for search argument "Twitter".

There is a sharp increase for search volume around March/April 2007, followed by a stabilization from June 2007. For news items there is also a sharp increase around March/April 2007. The volume of news shows however a declining trend.

Google Trends also presents interesting additional information.

Region : Japan and Taiwan on top, USA only in fourth place
Cities : top 4 locations in Japan, followed by Taipei, Taiwan, first US location is San Francisco
Languages : Japanese is by far the most frequently used language.

Does this indicate that Twitter is a big hit in Japan and Taiwan, and less successful in the USA ?

Compared to two rivals - Pownce and Jaiku (recently bought by Google) - Twitter is getting a higher search volume. Furthermore Google Trends does not report news items for Jaiku and Pownce. These observations from Google Trends indicate that Twitter could be far more popular than Pownce and Jaiku.

Long tail of Twitter

2007-10-31T00:10:00.000+01:00

The Long Tail is a concept to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. A long tail distribution is characterized by a short head and a heavy tail. In many cases the long tail can make up the majority of the distribution. Businesses such as Amazon.com or Netflix can generate a significant part of their income by selling a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes. The long tail was introduced by Chris Anderson who also wrote a book on this subject : The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

I wanted to know if the long tail distribution could also be observed in the Twitter world. I started by looking around for reliable quantitative information on Twitter users. There are several sites with top lists of Twitter users. I discovered that these top lists are not 100% reliable (see this blogpost). Furthermore they only cover a top 100 (Twitdir) or a top 150 (Twittown). So I created my own top 500 list.

A long tail distribution follows a powerlaw (or Pareto distribution), which can easily be discovered by looking at a log-log plot of the distribution (both axes on a logarithmic scale) where the actual data points should show up as a straight line in case of a powerlaw. If you click on the graph below you will get a better view at the plots of the distribution of the top 500 of Twitter users by number of following (the number of Twitter users a Twitter user is following), by number of followers (the number of other Twitter users following a Twitter account) and by number of updates (number of Twitter messages published).

The "normal" plots of the distributions show a very short head. The distributions on the log-log plots resemble a straight line, suggesting a long tail.

These graphs are only based on the distribution of a top 500 of Twitter users. There are two problems. In the first place I am not absolutely sure that the lists I compiled are the true lists of top 500 users for the three criteria. It is very likely that I missed several Twitter accounts. Furthermore as there are currently over 500,000 Twitter users, a picture of a top 500 does not tell anything about the rest of the distribution.

Instead of focussing on the complete Twitter community, I zoomed in on two subcommunities, the Twitter community of two countries : Brazil in South America and Belgium in Europe. Looking at the location information in the Twitter profiles I was able to identify 1700 Twitter users in Brazil and 1000 Twitter users in Belgium. European users were among the first to start using Twitter. The popularity of Twitter in South America started later.

Brazil

Belgium

For both countries the observed distributions show similar patterns. A very short head followed by a long tail. The distributions resemble slightly a powerlaw. The correlation coefficients (R-square values) are between 0,76 (Brazil - number of updates) and 0,86 (Brazil - number of followers). The correlation coefficients for the top 500 distributions are even higher : between 0,95 and 0,98 - suggesting a very strong powerlaw relationship.

The long tail concept was introduced to describe how business could sell less to more. As the founders of Twitter haven't yet decided on their business model it is not clear how money can be made on Twitter. How money can made of the long tail of Twitter users remains even a bigger question.

TwitterWhere

2007-10-25T22:49:00.001+02:00

Twitter is a community of more then 500,000 users. Within this big Twitter community there are many subcommunities. Some Twitters users expressed their need to find Twitter users within their geographical area. But until recently there was no easy way to locate Twitter users from a certain area.

TwitterWhere generates an RSS or XML Feed to filter out Tweets around a certain area. The RSS or XML feeds are based on a city name, state name, or postal code and the range of miles. To access this feed it has to added to an RSS reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, ...). As TwitterWhere is parsing the Twitter public timeline, only Twitter messages from public profiles are known to TwitterWhere. Users who have chosen to keep their message only accessible to their friends (also described private Twitter accounts) will not show up in the RSS of XML feeds, although their profiles often indicate their geographical location.

TwitterWhere is developed by Matt King, an Interactive Developer living in Portland, Oregon. He took only a few hours to get this site running according to a post on his blog. Matt wrote the app in Ruby on Rails.

TwitterWhere was clearly developed with a focus on Twitter users in the United States. Postal codes only work for the USA and the range of the distance is miles, not kilometers.

I subscribed to feeds for several locations in Europe, the continent where I am living. I noticed that the calculation of the distances between two geographical locations can be improved. A few examples to illustrate this.

* Malaga, Spain is within 10 miles of Madrid, Spain according to TwitterWhere, 338.23 miles according to Mapquest
* Bergen-op-zoom, Netherlands is within 50 miles of Brussels, Belgium according to TwitterWhere, but 59.85 miles according to Mapquest
* Lübeck, Germany is within 100 miles of Apeldoorn, Netherlands according to TwitterWhere, but 271.36 miles according to Mapquest
* A Coruña, Spain is within 50 miles of Brussels, Belgium according to TwitterWhere, 1136.53 miles according to Mapquest

TwitterWhere is a nice new tool to support the Twitter community. I hope that the Dual 1.8GHz Powermac G5 server will be capable of handling the traffic as the popularity of this site will surely increase.

Twitter Top Lists

2007-10-16T01:33:00.000+02:00

If you are looking for different top lists regarding Twitter users you have several possibilities.

The first site with top 100 lists was Twitterholic. Currently there is something wrong with this site, all Twitter users shown on the three lists (top 100 by followers, by friends and by updates) have 1 follower, 1 friend and 1 update.

Looking at the Twitterholic stats for the BBCWorld Twitter account, it looks like Twitterholic is experiencing the problems already for several weeks.

Another site where you can find top 100 lists is Twitdir. The full top 100 lists (followed, updaters, favouriters, followers) are not available as a single page, but you can browse thru these lists in groups of 5 Twitter users.

Top 150 lists can also be found at Twittown (followers, updates and following).

I have noticed that the lists at Twittown and Twitdir do not show the same Twitter accounts. Furthermore the quantitative data shown is not equal for some of the Twitter accounts.

Following

Updates

The current available Twitter top lists from Twitdir and Twittown cannot be considered to be 100% reliable. I can think of only one site that has full access to complete and up to date statistics, namely Twitter Inc themselves. But they do not disclose this kind of information ...

Tools to post Twitter messages

2007-10-12T00:42:00.000+02:00

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%

Twittering without access to Twitter.com

2007-10-11T02:01:00.000+02:00

Big companies (and sometimes also smaller companies) have often decided that instant messaging and social networking sites are keeping their employees from the actual work. Hence, they have chosen to block internet access to these instant messaging and social networking sites. As Twitter becomes more popular, Twitter is often also blocked in these companies. What are your options to keep in touch with your Twitter friends during office hours if direct internet access to Twitter.com is blocked ?

There are different Twitter client programs available, but if an employer blocks internet access to specific sites, it is very likely that employees do not have the possiblity to install software on their computers on their own initiative. So I did not take these programs further into account as possible bypasses.

Option 1 : Use your mobile phone to receive and send Twitter messages as text messages (SMS)
Disadvantages

If you are following several Twitter users with a high post volume, your mobile phone will continuously receive new messages. Its capacity of storing text messages will soon be reached.
Following hyperlinks in text messages is not easy, you have to retype the whole URL in your browser.
If the mobile phone you are using is a company phone will your employer accept this usage of the mobile phone ?

Option 2 : Switch to a mobile phone capable of mobile surfing
Disadvantages

The size of the screen is rather small.
Expensive if you have to pay for such a mobile phone yourself.

Option 3 : Subscribe to the RSS-feed "with friends" from your Twitter account in your favorite web based feedreader such as Bloglines or Google Reader
Disadvantages

A web based feedreader does not check every minute if there are updates, so messages are often delayed.
Messages from private Twitter accounts are not visible in the RSS-feed.
You can only read Twitter messages, you cannot send Twitter messages.
This is only possible if direct internet access to these web based feedreaders is not blocked.

Option 4 : Twitter Digest : Twitter Digest generates a daily digest of all Twitter messages of the Twitter accounts you supplied, either on a web page or thru an RSS feed
Disadvantages

You have to enter manually all twitter accounts in Twitter Digest you are following and you have to keep this list in sync with the actual list on the Twitter platform.
Messages from private Twitter accounts are not visible in the RSS-feed.
You can only read Twitter messages, you cannot send Twitter messages.
This is only possible if direct internet access to Twitter Digest is not blocked.

Option 5 : There are several sites that allow you to post Twitter message on your account by sending them an email
Examples of these services are EmailTwitter, Mail2Twitter and TwitterMail.
Disadvantages

In quite of lot of companies the email system automatically adds a footer to each outgoing email message. Would you like this footer to appear on each of your Twitter messages ?
Do you trust these services by providing them with your Twitter id and password, either by sending these by email with each message you want to post (Mail2Twitter) or by registering on their website (TwitterMail) ?
Does the email policy at your employer allows you to send this kind of messages thru your corporate email account ?

If your employer has chosen to block Twitter's website, I am not sure that your employer will appreciate that you apply some or all tips described in this post. If you really want to stay in touch with your Twitter friends during office hours, look for another employer.

Twitter Number of Users

2007-10-10T20:50:00.000+02:00

TwitDir has identified until now (October 10, 2007) more than 500,000 Twitter users. TwitDir is only capable of detecting Twitter users with a public profile, meaning that 500,000 is an underestimation of the total number of Twitter users.

In July 2007 I reported that the number of Twitter users detected by Twitdir grew by 2,000 new accounts per day. Looking at the numbers reported by Twitdir recently I have the impression that this growth has slowed down to 1,500 new users per day.

First state of the Twitosphere in Chile

2007-10-07T09:23:00.000+02:00

Last week I published an analysis of the Twitosphere in Argentina. In August I published an analysis of the Twitosphere in Brazil. On this analysis (for Brazil) a commenter mentioned an Argentinian initiative called Tuitiar.com but he also indicated that Chile has the highest Internet penetration of Latin America. I wanted to verify wether Chile has also a very active Twitter community.

Using the same approach as for all previous analyzed countries, I was able to find 593 active Twitter accounts from Chile. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Chile if the location explicitely refers to Chile or if the Twitter user was located in Chile according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Chilean Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 16.6 million people (according to Wikipedia), Chile has 593 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Chilean Twitter account for every 28,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for roughly 10,000 inhabitants. The two other South American countries had a significant lower penetration of Twitter (Argentina : 1 for every 45,000 inhabitants, Brazil : 1 for every 451,000 inhabitants).

History of the Chilean Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Chilean Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Chilean Twitter accounts.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Chile
http://twitter.com/OjoPiojo - Rodrigo Guaiquil - first message on 12/10/2006
http://twitter.com/paulbeelen - Paul Beelen - first message on 22/10/2006
http://twitter.com/ochovio - ochovio - first message on 17/11/2006
http://twitter.com/juque - Juan Pablo Aqueveque - first message on 17/11/2006
http://twitter.com/wachunei - wachunei - first message on 18/11/2006

The first Twitter user I was able to identify only showed up mid October 2006, several months later compared to other countries. The popularity of Twitter started to grow from March/April 2007. The graph reveals that this growth is still continuing, with even an acceleration from August 2007.

Public of Private
77 Twitter acounts from Chile or 13% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium). For Argentina this percentage was only 3.2%.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 26% of the Chilean Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Chile follows 14.4 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy). For Argentina the average was much higher : 46.8. Chilean Twitter accounts are on average followed by less other Twitter users compared to Argentinian Twitter accounts.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/crhistian - crhistian - 174 following
http://twitter.com/fmeza - Fernando Meza - 162 following
http://twitter.com/DonPepe - Don Pepe - 157 following
http://twitter.com/dubo - César Dubó - 153 following
http://twitter.com/eduardoe - Eduardo Escarez - 146 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 9% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Chile has 16.5 followers. This average is in line with the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy). The average for Chile is however again lower than the average for Argentina : 46.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/mariapastora - M. Pastora Sandoval - 210 followers
http://twitter.com/dubo - César Dubó - 196 followers
http://twitter.com/OjoPiojo - Rodrigo Guaiquil - 173 followers
http://twitter.com/crhistian - crhistian - 162 followers
http://twitter.com/Paloma - Paloma Baytelman - 153 followers

Updates
5% of the accounts from Chile are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Chile has 215 updates, which is again higher than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). This time the average for Chile is comparable to the average for Argentina (225). Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/sepulveda - Diego Sepulveda - 4.939 updates
http://twitter.com/latercera - La Tercera - 4.917 updates
http://twitter.com/Cooperativa - Radio Cooperativa - 4.313 updates
http://twitter.com/Sauce - Sauce - 3.879 updates
http://twitter.com/rots - Rodrigo Vera - 3.832 updates

Degree of activity
37% of all Twitter accounts from Chile with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

48% of all Twitter accounts from Chile with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. This percentage (48%) is comparable to the percentages for Argentina (45%) and Brazil (52%). It is significantly higher than the percentages of active users observed for the European countries. The South American Twitospheres seem more active than the European Twitospheres.

Conclusion
This state of the Chilean Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Chile were rather late to start using Twitter, the first Twitter user only appeared mid October 2006. The popularity of Twitter in Chile started to rize from March/April 2007, about at the same time as for the analyzed European countries. Where the growth in Europe slowed down, the creation of new Twitter accounts in Chile continued steadily.

The Twitter community in Chile is in absolute numbers not as big as the Twitter community in Argentina, but the number of Twitter users divided by the size of the population indicate that there are relatively more Twitter users in Chile (more than twice as much). It is very well possible that this is caused by the fact that Chile has the highest Internet penetration of Latin America.

The main difference of the Twitter communities in Argentina and Chile is that the Twitter community in Argentina is much more interlinked. On average each Twitter account is following more Twitter users.

First state of the Twitosphere in Argentina

2007-10-04T23:01:00.000+02:00

I already published several blogposts on this blog with an analysis of the Twitosphere in several countries (see the sidebar). On the previous analysis (for Brazil) a commenter mentioned an Argentinian initiative called Tuitiar.com (a blog and a Twitter account). So it won't be a surprise that the next country analyzed is Argentina.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 896 active Twitter accounts from Argentina. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Argentina if the location explicitely refers to Argentina or if the Twitter user was located in Argentina according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Argentinian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 40,3 million people (according to Wikipedia), Argentina has 896 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Argentinian Twitter account for every 45,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for roughly 10,000 inhabitants.

History of the Argentinian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Argentinian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Argentinian Twitter accounts.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Argentina
http://twitter.com/Leech - Leandro Ardissone - first message on 28/09/2006
http://twitter.com/2Curious - 2Curious - first message on 29/10/2006
http://twitter.com/pugvichka - pugvichka - first message on 4/11/2006
http://twitter.com/dfgonzalez - Diego - first message on 21/11/2006
http://twitter.com/slaff - slaff - first message on 1/12/2006

Public of Private
Only 37 Twitter acounts from Argentina or 3.2% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium).

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 20% of the Argentinian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Argentina follows 46.8 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy). There are several Twitter accounts from Argentina with a relatively high number of following, see the top 5 below.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/Pachoro - Pachoro - 1111 following
http://twitter.com/espina - niñoespina - 1010 following
http://twitter.com/simonapalermo - simonapalermo - 800 following
http://twitter.com/elpeor - elpeor - 715 following
http://twitter.com/flowmi - flowmi - 684 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 8% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Argentina has 46.3 followers. This average is higher than the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy). There are several Twitter accounts from Argentina with a relatively high number of followers, see the top 5 below.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/tuitiar - Tuitiar.com - 628 followers
http://twitter.com/Conz - Conz - 516 followers
http://twitter.com/espina - niñoespina - 495 followers
http://twitter.com/dariogallo - d.g. - 472 followers
http://twitter.com/mancini - Pablo Mancini - 410 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Argentina are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Argentina has 225 updates, which is again higher than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/lanacioncom - La Nacion - 6418 updates
http://twitter.com/pabloaltclas - paltclas - 5210 updates
http://twitter.com/mtorchiari - Marina Torchiari - 5162 updates
http://twitter.com/espina - niñoespina - 5113 updates
http://twitter.com/clarincom - clarincom - 4087 updates

Degree of activity
40% of all Twitter accounts from Argentina with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

45% of all Twitter accounts from Argentina with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. This percentage (45%) is significantly higher than the percentages of active users observed for the European countries. This percentage is comparable to the percentage observed for the twitosphere in Brazil (52%0.

Conclusion
This state of the Argentinian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Argentina were not among the first to start using Twitter, the first Twitter user only appeared at the end of September 2006, followed by the next one exactly one month later. There was an increase in the number of Twitter users in Argentina from March/April 2007, about at the same time as for the analyzed European countries. Where the growth in Europe slowed down, the creation of new Twitter accounts in Argentina accelerated from the beginning of August 2007.

The current Twitter community in Argentina is increasing day by day, the percentage of active Twitter accounts is higher than in the analyzed European countries. The future for Twitter in Argentina looks bright.

Twitter.com response time

2007-09-20T00:34:00.000+02:00

I just did a couple of tests with host-tracker to get an idea of the response times of the Twitter website.

Test 1
Received responses : 37
Average response time : 1.93 sec

Test 2
Received responses: 34
Average response time: 1.92 sec

Test 3
Received responses: 35
Average response time: 1.09

Test 4
Received responses: 36
Average response time: 1.17

I have the impression that when I launch Twitter.com myself, it takes more time to load.

Unfortunately the uptime statistics for Twitter.com at pingdom have stopped working from August 7, 2007.

Does anyone else know others tools monitoring the availability or response times of Twitter.com ?

Followers, Friends, Fans, Admirers, Connections, Subscribers, Visitors, ...

2007-09-17T22:01:00.000+02:00

My Twitter account has several followers, and I am following also several Twitter accounts. I have a lot of friends on Facebook. I have a few fans on Pownce. I have admirers on MyBlogLog. I have connections on Linkedin. Several persons are subscribers to the feeds of my blogs on Bloglines. The OneStat counter records the visitors of this blog.

Luckily, I have still friends for which I do not need fancy tools to meet and to have fun.

Twitstat

2007-09-12T21:45:00.000+02:00

Twitstat.com is an initiative of Michiel Berger from The Netherlands. He was looking for a nice tool to follow the Twitosphere. If you have been away for a couple of days, the Twitter interface does not allow you to quickly spot the most interesting topics being discussed within the community of your Twitter followers. He developed Twitstat.com as his own solution.

Twitstat monitors the Twitter messages from the users following the Twitstat account on Twitter. On Twitstat.com the detailed list of Twitter messages from the followers of Twitstat account on Twitter is shown. Twitstat.com also shows an overview by day of the total number of Twitter messages indexed and the top 10 of most active Twitter users for today and yesterday. Launched only on August 22, 2007, Twitstat is live for a couple of weeks. Currently the Twitstat account on Twitter is being followed by 96 other Twitter accounts, mostly from The Netherlands. The previous days around 800 Twitter messages have been indexed daily.

Twitstat also offers the possiblity to obtain statistics for an individual Twitter user. The picture below shows an overview of the Twitter messages from Erwin Blom, one of the most active Twitter users in The Netherlands (see also the Second state of the Dutch Twitosphere).

Another interesting feature of Twitstat is the possiblity to see how often and when a search string was present in the indexed Twitter messages. The picture below shows all Twitter messages containing the word "Twitter".

The graphs shown by Twitstat can be improved. Only the left most and right most columns are labeled with a date. The current graphs only contain columns for dates with Twitter messages, dates without messages are not shown as data points on the graph. The graphs are not a correct display of the time distribution of the indexed Twitter messages. For an example, have a look at the graph for search string "pownce". There were messages on 30-08-2007, 05-09-2007, 09-09-2007 and 11-09-2007. The graphs contains 4 columns, only two of them are labeled.

A very nice thing of Twitstat.com is that everything is also available as an RSS-feed. You can even get an RSS feed to find Twitter messages from a given Twitter user and a given search string. This RSS feed gives all Twitter messages from Marketingfacts containing "tinyurl".

Currently, Twitstat.com isn't even in beta yet. The number of Twitter accounts followed is rather limited. The response times of Twitstat are amazingly fast. Will this be also the case if Twitstat becomes more popular ? I can imagine that keeping Twitstat alive will require some funding (e.g. for the storage of data or the bandwith) in the future. Will Twitstat.com remain ad-free ?

If Twitstat.com becomes too popular there is a risk that its usefulness will decrease. I can imagine a situation in which a Twitter user from The Netherlands is interested in a specific topic discussed within the Dutch Twitter community. If this topic is also discussed in the global Twitophsere (indexed by Twitstat) the search results for the specific topic will probably contain a lot of Twitter messages in which the Twitter user is not interested in. The signal to noice ratio will decrease.

Private Twitter accounts visible on Facebook

2007-09-08T14:43:00.000+02:00

Messages from private Twitter accounts should be only read by other Twitter accounts that have been approved by the owner of the private Twitter account. I discovered that messages from private Twitter accounts can be read by other users on Facebook.

Peter Dedecker is one of my friends on Facebook. I am however not a follower of his private Twitter account. With my Twitter account I do not have access to his private Twitter messages.

Peter installed the Twitter application on Facebook, showing his Twitter messages on his Facebook account.

If you have a private Twitter account you have to be careful by installing the Twitter application on Facebook. This application assumes that all your friend on Facebook have also been accepted to follow your private messages on Twitter.

Update September 14, 2007
According to this blogpost new Twitter accounts cannot be accessed anymore thru Facebook. I just checked if I still have access to the private Twitter account used in the original post, which is still the case. It seems that private Twitters accounts that already are linked to Facebook accounts remain visible.

Twitter People Search

2007-08-24T00:11:00.000+02:00

This week profile search was added to Twitter, as announced on Twitter and on the Twitter blog.

Earlier this week, Terraminds, a brand new Twitter search engine was announced, also on Twitter and on a blog. Terraminds allows to search in updates and also in users.

The arrival of these two brand new Twitter people search tools is a good opportunity to review three Twitter people search engines.

Twitter search

Launched : August 22, 2007
Author : Twitter Inc.
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio, last message
Results : public and private twitter accounts matching the search argument(s), if your account is accepted as follower the last message will be shown
Grouping : Results in groups of 20
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : partial matching "travel" will also match "traveler", multiple terms accepted "John Mexico" will return all Twitter users where "John" appears in one of the fields and where "Mexico" also appears in one the fields, not necessary the same field containing "John"
Response times : fast
Additional information : Only available if you are logged in
A few test cases :
Miami : 275
Travel : 652
Linkedin : 183

Twitdir

Launched : May 24, 2007
Author : Laurent Pantanacce
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio, last message, number of following, followers, favorites and updates including indication if Twitter accounts appears in top 10, top 100 or top 1000
Results : only public Twitter accounts matching the search argument(s)
Grouping : Results in groups of 5
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : partial matching "travel" will also match "traveler", only full string matching "John Smith" will not give the same results as "Smith John", "John Mexico" will return only the Twitter accounts where this search argument can be found in one of the fields
Response times : rather slow
Additional information : Over 400,000 Twitter users known to Twitdir, Twitdir offers also Top 100 lists for number of followers, followed, updaters, favouriters
A few test cases :
Miami : 262
Travel : 618
Linkedin : 40

Terraminds

Launched : August 20, 2007
Author : Chris Laux
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio
Results : only public Twitter accounts matching the search argument(s)
Grouping : Results in groups of 20
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : Full matching of search string : "travel" will not return "traveler", multiple terms accepted "John Mexico" will return all Twitter users where "John" appears in one of the fields and where "Mexico" also appears in one the fields, not necessary the same field containing "John"
Response times : very fast
Additional information : in operation only for a few days, number of known Twitter users is probably still rather limited
A few test cases :
Miami : about 32 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week
Travel : about 75 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week
Linkedin : about 1 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week

There are also search tools capable of searching for Twitter messages. See my previous post on this subject. Indirectly these tools allow also to look up Twitter users based on search arguments appearing in their messages.

Is there still a future for Twitter people search tools now that Twitter has launched profile search ? I personally think there is still room for Twitter people search tools offering something more. What is currently lacking is advanced search. None of the search tools accept complex query syntax with operators as "and", "or" and "not". Futhermore, currently all fields are searched. It is not possible to limit a search to a specific field, e.g. only Twitter with miami as location.

Virtual travel agent on Twitter

2007-08-22T22:57:00.000+02:00

Marco Derksen, owner of Marketingfacts.nl, the most famous marketing blog in The Netherlands, just spent his holiday in Finland. What has this to do with Twitter ? Quite a lot.

When Marco was thinking of finding a holiday location, he asked advice to his 300+ followers on Twitter. He got several suggestions, including Finland. When he later asked for specific tips for Finland, he received several of them. When he finally made it to Finland, he stayed in touch with his homebase by informing his followers of his wherabouts and his travel experiences in Finland.

Upon his return, he made a blogpost and a presentation (both in Dutch) describing his experiences. He suggests another, innovative use of Twitter, Twitter as a virtual Travel Agent. He already started several new Twitter accounts for people traveling to various holiday locations (Amsterdam, United States, Australia, Canada and Finland). The goal is that someone, e.g.John Smith planning to go to one of these holiday locations, would follow the Twitter account for his destination. The Twitter travel account will also follow John Smith's Twitter account. When John Smith would ask questions in his Twitter feed, these answers will be picked up by the location experts for the Twitter account. Ideally tourists would also exchange travel tips between themselves. If there would be an interface between Twitter and a photo sharing service (e.g. Flickr), tourists and location experts can also exchange pictures. The advantage for John Smith of using Twitter during hist stay at the holiday location, is that he can receive travel tips on his mobile phone.

Marco's suggestion to use Twitter as a virtual travel agent has however also its limitations. This worked fine for Marco, because of his impressive network (on Twitter but also through the Marketingfacts blog and in real life in the Netherlands). What is lacking from his idea is the funding. Why would someone help people he never met before (and probably will never meet) with travel tips for a location ? Who will pay the location experts ? There are plenty of other sites where you can find useful information during the planning phase of a holiday. Twitter is OK for exchange of messages, but it is rather difficult to look up Twitter messages from the past.

Future will tell if Twitter will be used as a virtual travel agent.

Second state of the DutchTwitosphere

2007-08-21T21:18:00.000+02:00

On April 22, 2007 I published the first state of the Twitosphere in the Netherlands. With this new state of the Twitosphere I want to give an idea how the Twitosphere in the Netherlands has evolved from then.

Using the same approach as for the first state of the Twitosphere, I managed to find 2090 active Twitter accounts from the Netherlands. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from the Netherlands if the location explicitely refers to the Netherlands or if the Twitter user was located in the Netherlands according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Twitter users in the Netherlands is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 16.57 million people (according to Wikipedia), the Netherlands has 2090 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Twitter account for every 7,928 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in the Netherlands
This graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts in the Netherlands. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts. For private Twitter accounts (177) the date of the first message is not accessible. In addition to that, there are still 88 Twitter accounts without a single update, they are still waiting for the first message to be published. The growth of the number of Twitter accounts in the Netherlands accelerated from mid March 2007. This accelerated growth seems to continue until now. On an average day 8 new Twitter accounts are created by someone from the Netherlands.

Degree of activity
The graph below is generated only for the Twitter accounts where I could determine the date of the first message and the date of the last message, meaning that Twitter users without messages and private Twitter accounts were left out.

The graph contains two parts. In the upper part, Twitter users who have published at one Twitter message in the last 14 days are plotted as a line, starting from the date of the first message to the date of the last message. The color of the line depends on the number of messages (also called updates) published. The lower part contains Twitters users without updates in the last 14 dates. These accounts can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

The lines in the lower part of the graph are much shorter and show almost no colors.

Types of Twitters users in the Netherlands
A while ago I published a blogpost describing 4 types of Twitter users : Lurkers, Bots, High Influentials and Twitter stars.

On the graph below all 2090 Twitter users in the Netherlands are plotted according to their number of updates and the number of followers. There are currently no High Influential Twitter users (high number of followers but low number of updates). There are several Bots - Twitter accounts where the messages are automatically generated (low number of followers and very high number of updates). Luckily there are several Twitter Stars in the Netherlands, e.g. twitter.com/Dutchcowboy, twitter.com/erwblo, twitter.com/frankmeeuwsen, twitter.com/gervis, twitter.com/marketingfacts en twitter.com/tonie.

Top lists
To conclude this state of the Twitosphere, several top lists of Twitter accounts according to different criteria.

Oldest Twitter accounts from the Netherlands
http://twitter.com/cvodb - Caroline - first message on 14/07/2006
http://twitter.com/ianus - !ianus keller - first message on 15/07/2006
http://twitter.com/martijn - Martijn - first message on 15/07/2006
http://twitter.com/SLAM - Stéphan - first message on 21/07/2006
http://twitter.com/stronk - stronk - first message on 24/07/2006

Top 5 Following
http://twitter.com/fortune_cookie - fortune_cookie - 1128 following
http://twitter.com/twitterNL - NL - 1150 following
http://twitter.com/KennySB - Christian Weij - 996 following
http://twitter.com/todaysart - TodaysArt Festival! - 933 following
http://twitter.com/3VOOR12 - 3VOOR12 - 564 following

Top 5 Followers
http://twitter.com/3VOOR12 - 3VOOR12 - 551 followers
http://twitter.com/twitterNL - NL - 482 followers
http://twitter.com/marketingfacts - Marco Derksen - 450 followers
http://twitter.com/erwblo - erwin blom - 433 followers
http://twitter.com/FrRoderick - Roderick Vonhogen - 381 followers

Top 5 Updates - manually generated Twitter messages
http://twitter.com/erwblo - erwin blom - 7355 updates
http://twitter.com/marketingfacts - Marco Derksen - 6823 updates
http://twitter.com/gerben - Gerben Bouwhuis - 6060 updates
http://twitter.com/vangeest - Yuri van Geest - 5206 updates
http://twitter.com/Slijterijmeisje - Petra - 4719 updates

Top 5 Updates - automatically generated twitter messages
http://twitter.com/ShopAHolic - Shopaholic - 84089 updates
http://twitter.com/detelegraaf - De Telegraaf - 7046 updates
http://twitter.com/spitsnet - Sp!ts - 5851 updates
http://twitter.com/volkskrant - De Volkskrant - 5578 updates
http://twitter.com/MegaJobs - MegaJobs.nl - 3402 updates

Second state of the Belgian Twitosphere

2007-08-16T21:32:00.000+02:00

On April 17, 2007 I published the first state of the Twitosphere in Belgium, my home country. With this new state of the Twitosphere I want to give an idea how the Belgium Twitosphere has evolved since then.

Using the same approach as for the first state of the Twitosphere, I managed to find 854 active Twitter accounts from Belgium. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Belgium if the location explicitely refers to Belgium or if the Twitter user was located in Belgium according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Belgian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 10.5 million people (according to Wikipedia), Belgium has 854 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Twitter account for every 12,295 inhabitants.

History of the Belgian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Belgian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Belgian Twitter accounts. For the 107 private Twitter accounts the date of the first message is not accessible. In addition to that, there are still 25 Belgian Twitter accounts without a single update, they are still waiting for the first message to be published. This leads to a graph based on 693 Twitter accounts. The growth of the number of Twitter accounts in Belgium accelerated from mid March 2007. This accelerated growth seems to continue until now.

Degree of activity
The graph below is generated only for the Twitter accounts where I could determine the date of the first message and the date of the last message, meaning that Twitter users without messages and private Twitter accounts were left out.

The graph contains two parts. In the upper part, Twitter users who have published at least one Twitter message in the last 14 days are plotted as a line, starting from the date of the first message to the date of the last message. The color of the line depends on the number of messages published (also called updates). The lower part contains Twitters users without updates in the last 14 dates. These accounts can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

The lines in the lower part of the graph are much shorter and show almost no colors, confirming the hypothesis that these Twitter accounts are inactive.

Types of Twitters users in Belgium
A while ago I published a blogpost describing 4 types of Twitter users : Lurkers, Bots, High Influentials and Twitter Stars.

On the graph below all 854 Belgian Twitter users are plotted according to their number of updates and the number of followers. There are currently no High Influential Twitter users (high number of followers but low number of updates). There are several Bots - Twitter accounts where the messages are automatically generated (low number of followers and very high number of updates). Luckily there are several Twitter Stars in Belgium, e.g. twitter.com/aguerra, twitter.com/emichbe, twitter.com/erlend, twitter.com/mvuijlst, twitter.com/netlash, twitter.com/pascalvanhecke, twitter.com/Pietel, twitter.com/robinwauters and twitter.com/vpieters.

Top lists
To conclude this state of the Twitosphere, I present here top lists of Twitter accounts according to different criteria.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Belgium
http://twitter.com/zingo - Martin - first message on 22/08/2006
http://twitter.com/BuzzWorkers - Ben Borges - first message on 21/09/2006
http://twitter.com/onepointzero - Colin O'Brien - first message on 22/09/2006
http://twitter.com/lode - Lode - first message on 26/09/2006
http://twitter.com/cruchon - Nicolas Jacobeus - first message on 28/09/2006

Top 5 Following
http://twitter.com/thesisters - Anna & Betty - 503 following
http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 192 following
http://twitter.com/bartvanbelle - Bart Van Belle - 155 following
http://twitter.com/GDB - Geert De Busschere - 128 following
http://twitter.com/vpieters - Veerle Pieters - 124 following

Top 5 Followers
http://twitter.com/vpieters - Veerle Pieters - 845 followers
http://twitter.com/aguerra - Andrea Guerra - 244 followers
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 179 followers
http://twitter.com/robinwauters - Robin Wauters - 151 followers
http://twitter.com/peterelst - Peter Elst - 143 followers

Top 5 Updates - manualy generated Twitter messages
http://twitter.com/netlash - Bart - 1869 updates
http://twitter.com/emichbe - Michaël Uyttersprot - 1677 updates
http://twitter.com/atog - Koen Van der Auwera - 1585 updates
http://twitter.com/postback - vincent m - 1559 updates
http://twitter.com/aguerra - Andrea Guerra - 1493 updates

Top 5 Updates - automatically generated Twitter messages
http://twitter.com/dsonline - De Standaard Online - 21513 updates
http://twitter.com/ClopMonitor - ClopMonitor - 15937 updates
http://twitter.com/rtlinfo - RTL Info - 7076 updates
http://twitter.com/EUXTV - E U X . T V - 2129 updates
http://twitter.com/lesoir - Le Soir - 2076 updates

First state of the Twitosphere in Brazil

2007-08-15T00:20:00.000+02:00

I published already several blogposts on this blog with an analysis of the Twitosphere is several European countries (see the sidebar). The next country analyzed is not in Europe this time, but in South America : Brazil.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 421 active Twitter accounts from Brazil. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Brazil if the location explicitely refers to Brazil or if the Twitter user was located in Brazil according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Brazilian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 190 million people (according to Wikipedia), Brazil has 421 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Brazilian Twitter account for every 451,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for roughly 10,000 inhabitants.

History of the Brazilian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Brazilian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Brazilian Twitter accounts.

Oldest Twitter accounts from Brazil
http://twitter.com/crisdias - CrisDias - first message on 13/07/2006
http://twitter.com/vitorl - Vitor Leite - first message on 20/07/2006
http://twitter.com/guercheLE - Luciano E. Guerche - first message on 21/07/2006
http://twitter.com/eduardonasi - Eduardo Nasi - first message on 26/07/2006
http://twitter.com/flaviadurante - Flavia Durante - first message on 26/07/2006

Public of Private
Only 36 Twitter acounts from Brazil or 8.6% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium).

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 10% of the Brazilian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Brazil follows 12,0 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9,6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy).

Top 5
http://twitter.com/kleverson - Kleverson Neves - 206 following
http://twitter.com/ChrisD - Chris D - 146 following
http://twitter.com/Luzdeluma - Luma - 146 following
http://twitter.com/antoun - Henrique Antoun - 126 following
http://twitter.com/tdoria - Tiago Doria - 116 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 6% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Brazil has 12.0 followers. This average is in line with the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy).

Top 5
http://twitter.com/ChrisD - Chris D - 146 followers
http://twitter.com/tdoria - Tiago Doria - 116 followers
http://twitter.com/amanda_mpbr - Amanda Maykot - 73 followers
http://twitter.com/bdieu - Bee Kerouac - 73 followers
http://twitter.com/fseixas - Fabio Seixas - 52 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Brazil are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Brazil has 57 updates, which is lower than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). The lower average for Brazil can be explained by the fact that there is only one Twitter account with automatically generated Twitter messages. This kind of Twitter messages are often generated by news services. Please keep in mind that these averages are only snapshots, as lots of new Twitter messages (or Tweets) are published every day.

Top 5
http://twitter.com/jornaldedebates - Jornal de Debates - 1955 updates
http://twitter.com/antoun - Henrique Antoun - 691 updates
http://twitter.com/fernandolins - Fernando Lins - 658 updates
http://twitter.com/jplages - Joao Paulo - 516 updates
http://twitter.com/julielondongirl - ~*Julie*~ - 492 updates

Degree of activity
35% of all Twitter accounts from Brazil with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

52% of all Twitter accounts from Brazil with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. This percentage (52%) is significantly higher than the percentages of active users observed for the European countries.

Conclusion
This state of the Brazilian Twitosphere is only a snapshot, meaning that the figures mentioned in this post have already changed because the Twitosphere is a very dynamic environment with several new accounts being created every day, new connections being made between accounts (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from Brazil were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). There was a sharp increase in the number of Twitter users in Brazil from mid April 2007, about at the same time as for the analyzed European countries. The main difference is that the growth continues for Brazil, whereas the growth slowed down for the European countries. The creation of new Twitter accounts in Brazil seems even to accelerate from the beginning of August 2007.

The current Twitter community in Brazil is increasing day by day, the percentage of active Twitter accounts is higher than in the analyzed European countries. The future for Twitter in Brazil looks bright.