First State of the Irish Twitosphere

I published already several blogposts on this blog with an analysis of the Twitosphere is several European countries : Belgium (April 17, 2007), the Netherlands (April 22, 2007), Italy (May 7, 2007) and Spain (May 18, 2007). The next country analyzed is Ireland.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 284 still active Twitter accounts from Ireland. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Ireland if the location explicitely refers to Ireland or if the Twitter user was located in Ireland according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Irish Twitter users is probably higher as only a litle bit more than half of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post). For a population of 4,1 million people, Ireland has 284 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Irish Twitter account for every 14.437 inhabitants.

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


Oldest Twitter accounts from Ireland
http://twitter.com/fergalbreen - Fergal Breen - first message on 24/10/2006
http://twitter.com/PaulMWatson - Paul M. Watson - first message on 31/10/2006
http://twitter.com/thoughtwax - Emmet Connolly - first message on 2/11/2006
http://twitter.com/eoghanobrien - Eoghan O'Brien - first message on 7/11/2006
http://twitter.com/shellycahill - shelly - first message on 9/11/2006

Public of Private
Only 11 Twitter acounts from Ireland or 3,9% have chosen the keep their updates only available to their friends. This percentage has to be compared with 22% for Belgium, 9,5% for the Netherlands, 8,3% for Spain and 3,5% for Italy.

Number of friends
29% of the Irish Twitter accounts have no Twitter friends at all. An average Twitter account from Ireland has 8,8 friends, which is lower than all other analyzed countries : 9,6 friends for a Belgian Twitter account, 13,5 friends for a Dutch Twitter account, 15,8 friends for a Spanish Twitter account, and finally 32 friends for an Italian Twitter account.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/TomRaftery - Tom Raftery - 195 friends
http://twitter.com/topgold - topgold - 180 friends
http://twitter.com/CaptSolo - Uldis Bojars - 166 friends
http://twitter.com/conoro - Conor O'Neill - 112 friends
http://twitter.com/burkie - Burkie - 94 friends

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as friend and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 32% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as a friend. An average Twitter account from Ireland has 11,2 followers. For a Belgian Twitter account there were 10,5 followers, for a Dutch Twitter account there were 12,5 followers, for a Spanish Twitter account there were 16,9 followers, for an Italian Twitter account there were 26 followers.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/politics_ie - David Cochrane - 383 followers
http://twitter.com/TomRaftery - Tom Raftery - 175 followers
http://twitter.com/topgold - topgold - 141 followers
http://twitter.com/burkie - Burkie - 115 followers
http://twitter.com/conoro - Conor O'Neill - 105 followers

Updates
Only 2% of the accounts from Ireland are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Ireland has 83 updates, compared to 72 for a Belgian Twitter account and 88 for a Dutch Twitter account, 106 for an Italian and 106 for a Spanish Twitter account. 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/wxman - wxman - 6433 updates
http://twitter.com/conoro - Conor O'Neill - 1290 updates
http://twitter.com/topgold - topgold - 1063 updates
http://twitter.com/mattverso - Matt - 727 updates
http://twitter.com/mmbhg - brian greene - 686 updates

Degree of activity
46% of all Twitter accounts from Ireland with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts. For Italy this was 33%, for Spain this was 25%, for the Netherlands 10% and for Belgium 12%. 41% of all Twitter accounts from Ireland 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 Irish 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 (friends/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

There was a sharp increase in the number of Twitter users in Ireland from mid April 2007. From the beginning of May this growth slowed down, but continued until now. From this graph it is clear the Twitter hype is not yet over, at least in Ireland.