Twitter Facts: 2007

December 31, 2007

December 29, 2007

Most popular Twitter bookmarks on del.icio.us

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 ?

December 26, 2007

First State of the Twitosphere in India

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.

December 19, 2007

Tweeterboard

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.

December 18, 2007

First state of the Twitosphere in Canada

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.

December 14, 2007

Twittering for a good cause

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.

December 6, 2007

Club140

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.

November 22, 2007

Twitter for business

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

November 7, 2007

Twitterposter

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 ...

November 5, 2007

Twitter Trends

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.

October 31, 2007

Long tail of Twitter

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.

October 25, 2007

TwitterWhere

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.

October 16, 2007

Twitter Top Lists

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 ...

October 12, 2007

Tools to post Twitter messages

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 11, 2007

Twittering without access to Twitter.com

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.

October 10, 2007

Twitter Number of Users

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.

October 7, 2007

First state of the Twitosphere in Chile

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.

October 4, 2007

First state of the Twitosphere in Argentina

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.

September 20, 2007

Twitter.com response time

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 ?

September 17, 2007

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

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.

September 12, 2007

Twitstat

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.