Twitter People Search

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

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

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

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

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.

Twitter shares

Twitter is (not yet) listed on an official stockmarket. Virtual shares of Twitter are however already at two fantasy stockmarkets. Let's have a at the current values of the Twitter shares.

On Urladex, the number of hits per million users according to Alexa determines the potential price of the site's share. The screenshot below shows the info from Urladex for Twitter.com, including a graph from Alexa showing the daily reach for the last three months.

The current share price for Twitter.com on Urladex is $1,475.



Trendio is a stock exchange where words from the news are the stocks. The value of the words is calculated according to their presence in the media.

The current share price for Twitter.com on Trendio is $4.72, with an all time high of $10,30 and an all time low of 3.53.



Is there someone who has an idea of the value of the real Twitter shares ?

Sitevolume

With Sitevolume you can get an idea of the popularity of your search terms in 5 different popular Web 2.0 sites : Digg, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter.

I tried Sitevolume with three search terms : Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku. I tried these terms on 4 of the 5 available sites. It does not make sense to look how often search term "Twitter" is found within Twitter itself and compare this to the number of hits for two of its competitors.

Have a look yourself at the printscreens below. In all cases, Twitter obtained more search results than its two competitors.

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on Digg

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on MySpace

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on YouTube

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on Flickr

Twitter Location

Twitter users can specifiy their location in their profile. Everyone is free to specify whatever he or she wants. You can put a genuine location, you can put a fake location, you can put a phrase or you can leave it empty.

About 60% of a large set of Twitter users known to Twitterfacts mention "something" as their location. This "something" is in most cases useful to determine the location of the Twitter user. Others however make it a little bit difficult :
A little town in Europa,
Around the world,
Probably on a plane,
Changes weekly!,
on a magical island,
everywhere...and nowhere....,
with the penguins,
behind enemy lines,
Betcha wish you were here!,
dark side of the moon,
localhost,
None of your damned business!,
Not sure- i'll get back to you,
Secluded cement bunker,
That's a good question. Ask me
and finally also in Twitterville.

Some locations specificied by Twitter users confuse the geo-mashup services mapping Twitter users or Twitter messages to geographical locations. We can savely assume that location "SF" stands for "San Francisco". Location "SL" refers probably to "Second Life". Twittermaps plots Twitter users with location "SL" however in Sierra Leone, Africa - have a look at this example.

"AND" is the official country code for Andorra, a mini state in Europe. All Twitter users with a location consisting of a short phrase that starts with "And " are from Andorra according to Twittermaps (and Twittervision) - see this this example.

Twitter users who start there location with "ER " (especially German and Dutch speaking users, see this example) end up in Eritrea, also in Africa.

Exploring locations of Twitter users will let you explore our whole world, from the North Pole to Antartica.

Why we Twitter

Four researchers from the ebiquity research group at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County have released an excellent investigation of a two month period of Twitter messages and the authors of these messages.

The authors presents their conclusions regarding different types of intentions of Twitter users : daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news. They also describe main categories of users on Twitter : information source, friends and information seekers. For more information, have a look at their paper : Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.