TwitDir

TwitDir is a Twitter users directory, launched on May 24, 2007. TwitDir offers the possibility to perform a search on names of public Twitter accounts (both name as screen-name). In addition to this, TwitDir offers Top 20 lists : Top 20 followed, Top 20 updaters, Top 20 favouriters, Top 20 followers.


The TwitDir Top 20 lists look very similar to the Top 100 lists from Twitterholic. My first impression was that TwitDir did not add much compared to Twitterholic. It takes more time to load and it only shows 20 accounts. After a closer look I noticed several differences in the lists generated by both sites. The Top 100 lists from Twitterholic are far from complete. Let's have a look at the TwitDir and Twitterholic lists for number of followers and number of friends.

Followers
4 Twitter accounts from the TwitDir Top 20 followed are not listed in the Twitterholic Top 100 Followers. The number of followers according to TwitDir is always higher compared to the numbers of Twitterholic.

Friends
12 Twitter accounts from the TwitDir Top 20 followers are not listed in the Twitterholic top 100 Friends. The number of friends according to TwitDir is higher compared to the numbers of Twitterholic for 5 of the 8 accounts that appear in both lists.

Even Steven Jobs wondered a month ago why his Twitter account is not appearing on Twitterholic. It looks like that TwitDir is the best source of information for Twitter Top 20 lists.

TwitDir has launched a little game, they want us to guess how many public Twitter accounts there are. This number has to be greater than 120k according to one of the guesses. I created a Twitter account for testing two months ago. I haven't published anything on this account, there are no followers, nor did I add friends. I was really surprised to notice that TwitDir was able to find this account. TwitDir seems to have access to the complete list of Twitter accounts. I am really curious to know the number of Twitter accounts.

Twitterholic glitch

There seems to be a glitch at Twitterholic.

Twitterholic not only shows top 100 lists by number of friends, followers and updates, but it also shows detailed information for a Twitter user account. The page http://twitterholic.com/twitter/USERACCOUNT contains a graph showing the trend for the number of followers for the previous 30 days and a table showing for the last 30 days the number of followers, friends, updates and favorites.

At this moment date ranges for the graphs start from 03/18, 03/19 or 03/20 and end one month later. It seems that the graphs are not updated any more. This makes the page confusing because the (outdated) graph is not in sync with the (up to date) table below.



Bloggers have found last week another strange phenomenum at Twitterholic, surprising gains of thousands of new followers for some Twitter accounts. This problem was situated at Twitter.com and is solved. Also last week another problem concerning private Twitter accounts being visible in Twittervision and Twittermaps got a lot of publicity, although this problem (or a very similar) was also described in a blog post on this blog a few weeks ago. This problem was caused by Twittervision and is also solved by now (see explanation by the guys from Twitter themselves).

How long will it take for the next problem in Twitter or in one of the popular tools in the Twitter-world to get noticed ?

Traces of a Twitter User

If a Twitter user does not indicate that he wants his account to be visible only to his friends, all his Twitter messages can be read by anyone. To get an idea what someone is twittering about, you can have a loop at at his personal Twitter page. Twitter is also indexed by Google - with a very high pagerank - meaning that you can search specific words or phrases for a given Twitter user. There are two services that allow you to have a closer look at the traces of a Twitter user.

First let's have a look at the Twitter page of a random chosen Belgian Twitter user, Bart De Waele. He seems quite active with over 1000 updates. He is also popular in Belgium, having 54 friends and 106 followers. By the way, I know Bart personally and I am one of his Twitterfriends.


Twitterment is an initiative of the eBiquity Research Group at the University in Maryland Baltimore County. Twitterment scans Twitter messages from the Twitter public timeline. They have recently added the possibility to search Twitter messages by author. What does Twitterment reveal about Bart De Waele ?

- last messages : of Bart's over 1000 messages, only 192 are indexed by Twitterment


- hourly trends : at what time of the day is this author twittering ?


- daily trends : at what days of the week is this author twittering ?


- tagcloud : what are the most frequently used words in his messages ?


Twitterholic generates top 100 lists of Twitter users by number of followers, number of friends and number of updates. If you take a closer look, you can get some details for each of the users listed in the top 100 lists, and even for other users. Bart De Waele is not yet in one of the Twitterholic top 100 lists, but Twitterholic has some information about his Twitter account. Twitterholic shows a trendline for the number of followers and provides a detailed overview of the number of followers, friends, updates and favorites for the last month.


These graphs from both sources are not available for all Twitter users. For instance, my Twitter account (BVLG) is not showing up yet in both sources, although it is public.

If you want to find out yourself what these services know about you, you can use the URLs below. Substitute XXXXXX with your Twitter Username.
http://twitterment.umbc.edu/results.jsp?query=author:XXXXXX&maxresults=50
http://twitterholic.com/twitter/XXXXXX

Monitoring the buzz in the Twitosphere

With the increasing popularity of Twitter, people want to know what's hot within the Twitosphere. Several initiatives have popped up.

TwitterBuzz
Twitterbuzz shows you what people using Twitter are linking to. TwitterBuzz offers users different timeframes : an hourly view, a weekly view, a view from the start.


TwitterVerse
What is Twitter Doing Today : a tagcloud featuring the most used words in messages from Twitter. Different possibilities are available : words used today, the last hour, the last 5 or 10 hours or yesterday.


TwitterZone
Twitterzone offers 4 possibilities to get a view what's hot in the Twitosphere : most twittered words, most twittered links, most active twitters, most active services. The timeframe can be one hour, 24 hours, 7 days or 1 month.


TwitterSearch
TwitterSearch allows you to look up the twitter messages containing a keyword of your choice. TwitterSearch has limited memory, only going back a few hours.


What are people twittering about ?
A very simple interface shows a list of the 20 most common nouns or noun-phrases seen in different timeframes : last hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days and 1 week.


Twitterholic
Twitterholic provides insight to the top 100 twitters according to the number of updates, number of friends and number of followers. Twitterholic does not reveal the actual buzz, but rather the users who are likely to create the buzz.


As English is currently the most frequently used language by twitters, most services only provide information for English. Persons looking for twitters using other languages will have to wait a little bit before other, more localised services will pop up.