First state of the Twitosphere in Iceland

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.