Kosovo and Serbia in Twitter

Last Sunday Kosovo declared its indepence from Serbia. It is not that often that a new country declares its independence, especially in Europe. I had a look at the Twitter activity in Kosovo and in Serbia.

A lot of Twitter users are twittering about Kosovo, especially newsfeeds are publishing numerous article refering to Kosovo. Have a look at the trendgraph produced by Twittermeter for Kosovo.


The question I had was how many Twitter users might be present in this new country ? According to Twitter itself there are 6 users in Kosovo, Twitdir is able to find 5 users in Kosovo, and finally Terraminds finds 3 users in Kosovo. Looking a little bit deeper it looks that there are 8 different Twitter accounts in Kosovo :
twitter.com/albani
twitter.com/dreni
twitter.com/fisi
twitter.com/frakton
twitter.com/kosovo
twitter.com/nikaj
twitter.com/singfiel
twitter.com/xhakli

For a country of 2,2 million people (figures from 2005), there is a Twitter user acount for every 275,000 inhabitants.

In Serbia there are clearly more Twitter users. Twitter reports 74 Twitter users for Serbia, Twitdir reports 63 Twitter user, Terraminds reports 56 Twitter user. Combining these sources and further analysis gives me a total of 120 Twitter users in Serbia. For a population op 7.5 million people, this implies a Twitter user account for every 62,500 inhabitants. For Iceland, a tiny island with 300,000 inhabitants the Twitter user density is 3,725, for Australia the Twitter user density is 5,823.

It looks like the people of Kosovo have currently other things on their mind then registering themselves on Twitter and publishing Twitter messages. I can image that for quite a lot of people in Kosovo it is currently party time. Other people are perhaps protesting against the declaration of independence.

Twitdir Tops

If you are curious to find how many followers, followed, updates or favorties you need to have to be amongst the top Twitterers, you can take a look at Twitdir Tops.


If your Twitter account follows more than 7054 other Twitter users, if your Twitter account is being followed by more than 6499 other Twitter users, if youphave published more than 81077 Twitter messages and finally if you favorited more than 16388 Twitter messages, you can consider your Twitter account as a really "top" account.

Twitter userbase growing faster than expected

On January 6, 2008 I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million users (with a public profile) before April 1, 2008.

I have been tracking since then the number of Twitter users as reported by Twitdir. It looks like Twitter's userbase is growing faster than initially estimated. The dotted line on the graph below shows the estimated growth, the solid line the actual number of Twitter users. I have no doubt that the 1 million user mark will be reached before March 1, 2008.

Twittermeter

Twittermeter is one of these new launched Twitter tools. Twittermeter lets you query an index of all the words that have been sent to Twitter's public timeline since Twittermeter started gathering them on 6 November 2007 and plot the number of times that word was used over time.

Let's have a look at the results for "kerviel", the name of the French trader responsible for the loss of almost 5 billion EURO at Société Générale bank in France (see also this blogpost for the link between Kerviel and Twitter).



Comparing the results of Twittermeter with the number of Twitter messages found by Terraminds Twitter Search, I have the impression that Twittermeter is not capturing the same number of messages as found by Terraminds.



I do like the interface of Twittermeter. Let's hope that Twittermeter will soon index more messages from the Twitter public timeline.

First state of the Twitosphere in Australia

Twitter is used in almost every country on this globe, including in the countries down under. This time I will share some figures concerning the twitosphere in Australia.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 3641 active Twitter accounts from Australia. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Australia if the location explicitely refers to Australia or if the Twitter user was located in Australia according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Australian 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 21.2 million people (according to Wikipedia), Australia has 3641 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Australian Twitter account for every 5,823 inhabitants.

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


Oldest Twitter accounts from Australia
http://twitter.com/dataphage - dataphage - first message on 20/07/2006
http://twitter.com/sailor - Wilson - first message on 10/08/2006
http://twitter.com/sinisterfrog - sinisterfrog - first message on 26/08/2006
http://twitter.com/celia141 - Celia - first message on 27/08/2006
http://twitter.com/jngo - John - first message on 9/09/2006

Public of Private
336 Twitter acounts from Australia or 9.2% 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". 17% of the Australian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Australia follows 24 Twitter accounts.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/dan7 - Daniel - 3.460 following
http://twitter.com/grum - Chris Barraud - 2.110 following
http://twitter.com/JINXIE - Jacinta Gascoigne - 1.853 following
http://twitter.com/petendonna - Peter & Donna - 1.180 following
http://twitter.com/problogger - Darren Rowse - 906 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 Australia has 26 followers.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/Ed_Dale - Ed Dale - 1.992 followers
http://twitter.com/dan7 - Daniel - 1.634 followers
http://twitter.com/Kitta - Kitta - 1.606 followers
http://twitter.com/problogger - Darren Rowse - 1.474 followers
http://twitter.com/duncanriley - Duncan Riley - 1.063 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Australia are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Australia has 213 updates.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/aflbot - aflbot - 11.645 updates
http://twitter.com/Tuna - Gary Barber - 11.634 updates
http://twitter.com/andrewbarnett - andrew barnett - 11.560 updates
http://twitter.com/baggygreen - baggygreen - 10.510 updates
http://twitter.com/jjprojects - John Johnston - 10.057 updates

Tweet frequency
The tweet frequency is the average number of Twitter messages - also called Tweets - a Twitter users produces on a single day. I did only consider the Twitter users who have posted messages over a periode longer than 30 days.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/baggygreen - baggygreen - 152,32 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/cmail_breaking - CourierMail Breaking - 74,31 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/aflbot - aflbot - 36,97 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/1000Monkeys - 1000Monkeys - 35,38 tweets/day
http://twitter.com/jjprojects - John Johnston - 31,63 tweets/day

Degree of activity
48% of all Twitter accounts from Australia with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

34% of all Twitter accounts from Australia 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 Australian 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 Australia 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 Australian twitosphere accelerated further. The growth remained at the same speed from April 2007 until now.

The penetration of the number of Twitter users in Australia is very high compared to other countries previously analyzed, only Iceland - with a very small Twitter community - has an higher penetration.