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

First State of the Dutch Twitosphere

I was able to identify 451 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 (see this previous post).

The actual number of Dutch Twitter users is probably a lot higher. I would not be surprised if the actual number is somewhere between 800 and 1000. I was rather conservative in labeling a Twitter account as being Dutch. Only a lit bit more than half of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post). Furthermore private Twitter accounts or public Twitter accounts with no or only a few friends are very difficult to find.

I was able to retrace the history of the Dutch Twitter accounts. The following graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Dutch Twitter accounts. There is a steep increase of the growth of the number of Twitter accounts starting from March 15, 2007. From that day on, about 10 new Dutch Twitter were detected.


Oldest Dutch Twitter accounts
twitter.com/cvodb - Caroline - first message on 15/07/2006
twitter.com/ianus - !ianus keller - first message on 15/07/2006
twitter.com/martijn - Martijn - first message on 15/07/2006
twitter.com/alper - Alper Çugun - first message on 4/09/2006
twitter.com/steverosebush - Steve Rosebush - first message on 10/09/2006

Public of Private
70 Twitter acounts from the Netherlands or 9,5% have chosen the keep their updates only available to their friends. According to the First State of the Belgian Twitosphere (Belgium is a neighbouring country of the Netherlands) 22% of the Belgian Twitter accounts are private. This can indicate that Dutch private Twitter accounts are perhaps partly missing from this analysis.

Deleted accounts
Only 2 accounts are not available anymore. The owners of these accounts have chosen for whatever reason to stop twittering.

Number of friends
11% of the accounts have no Twitter friends at all. An average Twitter account from the Netherlands has 13,5 friends.


Top 5
twitter.com/alefevre - André le Fèvre - 168 friends
twitter.com/tanjadebie - Tanja - 143 friends
twitter.com/marketingfacts - Marco Derksen - 139 friends
twitter.com/TheBFF - The BFF - 122 friends
twitter.com/gervis - Gerrit Visser - 120 friends

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as friends and therefore receives all updates. 8% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as a friend. An average Twitter account from the Netherlands has 12,5 followers.


Top 5
twitter.com/FrRoderick - Roderick Vonhogen - 242 followers
twitter.com/marketingfacts - Marco Derksen - 119 followers
twitter.com/erwblo - erwin blom - 118 followers
twitter.com/frankmeeuwsen - Frank Meeuwsen - 104 followers
twitter.com/ppk - Peter-Paul Koch - 99 followers

Tweets
Only 1% of the accounts from the Netherlands are still waiting for their first Twitter message (or Tweet) to be published. Currently an average average Twitter account from the Netherlands has 88 Tweets. Please kind in mind that this average is only a snapshot, as lots of new Twitter messages are published everyday. The first "human" twitterer in the Top 5 is Erwin Blom on the 3rd place.


Top 5
twitter.com/detelegraaf - De Telegraaf - 3633 updates
twitter.com/volkskrant - De Volkskrant - 1694 updates
twitter.com/tagmos - TagMos.nl - 1355 updates
twitter.com/erwblo - erwin blom - 1158 updates
twitter.com/gervis - Gerrit Visser - 958 updates

Degree of activity
10% of all Twitter accounts from the Netherlands with a public feed did not post an update in the last 20 days. These account can perhaps be considered as "almost dead" accounts. 73% of all Twitter accounts from the Netherlands with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still very well alive.

Conclusion
This state of the Dutch 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 (friends/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

The number of Twitter users in the Netherlands remains rather low compared to the number of blogs, estimated at at least 1 million. The next months will show if the popularity of Twitter will continue to increase, not only for the Dutch Twitosphere but also for the global Twitosphere.

Twitterment

I just noticed the announcement of Twitterment on the eBiquity blog. Twitterment is a brand new Twitter search engine and buzz tracking system. Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API.

I submitted several queries to evaluate the possibilities of Twitterment. Twitterment offers the possiblity to compare the buzz for two search strings. I tried to track a specific trend : how often are people discussing work and sleep ? I tracked these words in different languages, in English of course, but also in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German and Dutch (my mother tongue). The results are rather different.

Persons twittering in English talk more often about work than about sleep. The time pattern does not reveal real peaks during the day. This is perhaps due to the fact that lots of people, scattered worldwide are using English in there messages.


For French it seems that there is very clear preference for sleep (dormir). The word "dormir" is however also a valid word in other languages, e.g. Spanish and Portuguese. As all graphs in this post show the absolute number of tweets, the only valid conclusion is that Twitter is only used by a small number of people using French to talk about work. A comparision between sleep and work is not possible.


For Spanish speaking twitters, work (trabajar) is a little bit more popular than it is for French speeking twitters. Sleep however remains more popular.


To talk about work is For Portuguese speaking twitters as unpopular as it is for French speeking twitters.


It seems that Italians do not prefer to talk about work, but rather about going to sleep (or not going to sleep ...). This conclusion is again based on a very low number of messages.


Persons using German (in countries such as Germany, Austria or Switserland) apparantly discuss work and sleep in about the same frequency. The number of messages is again very low.


For Dutch, in the morning work ("werken") is more often talked about, whereas going to sleep is popular in the evening. Timings in the graphs are in EST, not in European time.


My main conclusion is that English is the most dominant language, in comparison to the selected languages. Twitterment is a very handy tool to perform the kind of comparisons as discussed in this post.