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.