3 million Twitter users

On June 29, 2008 I wrote on this blog that Twitter reached 2 million users - according to Twitdir. Twitter has passed another milestone a few days ago, 3 million users. As Twitdir only "knows" Twitter users with a public profile, the actual number of Twitter users is higher, as discussed in this blogpost.


The growth of Twitter users follows an exponential curve - at least until now. If the same trend continues, 4 million will be reached around mid November. Around Christmas the 5 million mark will be reached. 6 million will be reached around mid January 2009 and 7 million around Mid February. Whatever the trend will be, I will continue to monitor this trend.

1.5 million Twitter users

On this blog, I have been tracking the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir. On April 28, I announced that Twitter passed the 1 million mark.

According to Twitdir, Twitter has currently over 1.5 million users. Over a period of a little bit more than two weeks Twitdir was capable of detecting 0.5 million users. This sudden increase in the number reported by Twitdir is probably due to a change in its algorithm, as announced on the Twitdir blog.



Who wants to make a guess when Twitter will reach the 2 million mark ?

1 million Twitter users according to Twitdir

Twitdir finally reported more than 1 million Twitter users, see the screenshot below.



I have been tracking the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir for a while.

On January 6, 2008, I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million public uers before April 1, 2008. Around mid February it seemed that the Twitter user base was growing faster than I expected. In the beginning of March however the growth slowed down.

The author of Twitdir announced last week on the Twitdir blog a new algorithm to follow the growth of Twitter users. This lead to an increase in the speed of Twitter users detected, as can be seen from on the graph below.



The reported slown down (around March 2008) is probably due to the old algorithm of Twitdir and not caused by a slowdown in the number of new Twitter users.

1 million Twitter users

On January 6, 2008, I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million public uers before April 1, 2008. Twitdir reports the number of public Twitter users it has detected. Around mid February it seemed that the Twitter user base was growing faster than I expected. In the beginning of March however the growth slowed down. This reduced growth has continued until now, see the graph below.

If this reduced growth continues at the same speed, the 1 million mark of public Twitter users according to Twitdir will be reached only around June 2008. There is no explanation why the growth of the Twitter user base suddenly changed from 3,500 new users per day to 750 new users per day.

As mentioned in one of the previous posts on this blog, the number of private Twitter users could be around 15%. This implies that the total number of Twitter accounts at this very moment already exceeds 1 million.

Growth of number of Twitter users according to Twitdir

A while ago I predicted that Twitter would have 1 million users before April 1, 2008. The source for the number of (public) Twitter users is Twitdir. Twitdir reports on its homepage the total number of Twitter users detected.

I observed a spectacular slowdown in the growth of the Twitter users reported by Twitdir. See the graph below.



Is the growth really slowing down ? Or is Twitdir not able to catch up ?

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.

Number of Twitter users

One reliable source for the number of Twitter users is Twitdir. Twitdir reports the number of Twitter it already discovered on its homepage. As Twitdir is only capable of detecting Twitter users with a public profile, this number is a underestimation of the total number of Twitter users. I have been following the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir for a couple of months by now. I made a graph showing the number of Twitter users according to Twitdir over the last seven months.


I want to make one prediction for 2007, more specifically regarding the number of Twitter users reported by Twitdir. I expect this number to reach 1 million before April 1, 2008.



By the way, as the percentage of Twitter users with a private profile is sometimes estimated at 10% to 15% Twitter will reach 1 million users even sooner, probably around March 1, 2008.

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 ...

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.

Twitter People Search

This week profile search was added to Twitter, as announced on Twitter and on the Twitter blog.

Earlier this week, Terraminds, a brand new Twitter search engine was announced, also on Twitter and on a blog. Terraminds allows to search in updates and also in users.

The arrival of these two brand new Twitter people search tools is a good opportunity to review three Twitter people search engines.

Twitter search


Launched : August 22, 2007
Author : Twitter Inc.
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio, last message
Results : public and private twitter accounts matching the search argument(s), if your account is accepted as follower the last message will be shown
Grouping : Results in groups of 20
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : partial matching "travel" will also match "traveler", multiple terms accepted "John Mexico" will return all Twitter users where "John" appears in one of the fields and where "Mexico" also appears in one the fields, not necessary the same field containing "John"
Response times : fast
Additional information : Only available if you are logged in
A few test cases :
Miami : 275
Travel : 652
Linkedin : 183

Twitdir


Launched : May 24, 2007
Author : Laurent Pantanacce
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio, last message, number of following, followers, favorites and updates including indication if Twitter accounts appears in top 10, top 100 or top 1000
Results : only public Twitter accounts matching the search argument(s)
Grouping : Results in groups of 5
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : partial matching "travel" will also match "traveler", only full string matching "John Smith" will not give the same results as "Smith John", "John Mexico" will return only the Twitter accounts where this search argument can be found in one of the fields
Response times : rather slow
Additional information : Over 400,000 Twitter users known to Twitdir, Twitdir offers also Top 100 lists for number of followers, followed, updaters, favouriters
A few test cases :
Miami : 262
Travel : 618
Linkedin : 40

Terraminds


Launched : August 20, 2007
Author : Chris Laux
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio
Results : only public Twitter accounts matching the search argument(s)
Grouping : Results in groups of 20
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : Full matching of search string : "travel" will not return "traveler", multiple terms accepted "John Mexico" will return all Twitter users where "John" appears in one of the fields and where "Mexico" also appears in one the fields, not necessary the same field containing "John"
Response times : very fast
Additional information : in operation only for a few days, number of known Twitter users is probably still rather limited
A few test cases :
Miami : about 32 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week
Travel : about 75 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week
Linkedin : about 1 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week


There are also search tools capable of searching for Twitter messages. See my previous post on this subject. Indirectly these tools allow also to look up Twitter users based on search arguments appearing in their messages.

Is there still a future for Twitter people search tools now that Twitter has launched profile search ? I personally think there is still room for Twitter people search tools offering something more. What is currently lacking is advanced search. None of the search tools accept complex query syntax with operators as "and", "or" and "not". Futhermore, currently all fields are searched. It is not possible to limit a search to a specific field, e.g. only Twitter with miami as location.

Number of Twitter users

In a recent interview (in French) Laurent Pantanacce, author of TwitDir.com, revealed some figures about the number of public Twitter accounts.

On July 18, 2007, TwitDir.com identified 340 000 public Twitter accounts. On average every day 2000 new Twitter accounts are created, as shown on the graph below.

TwitDir

TwitDir is a Twitter users directory, launched on May 24, 2007. TwitDir offers the possibility to perform a search on names of public Twitter accounts (both name as screen-name). In addition to this, TwitDir offers Top 20 lists : Top 20 followed, Top 20 updaters, Top 20 favouriters, Top 20 followers.


The TwitDir Top 20 lists look very similar to the Top 100 lists from Twitterholic. My first impression was that TwitDir did not add much compared to Twitterholic. It takes more time to load and it only shows 20 accounts. After a closer look I noticed several differences in the lists generated by both sites. The Top 100 lists from Twitterholic are far from complete. Let's have a look at the TwitDir and Twitterholic lists for number of followers and number of friends.

Followers
4 Twitter accounts from the TwitDir Top 20 followed are not listed in the Twitterholic Top 100 Followers. The number of followers according to TwitDir is always higher compared to the numbers of Twitterholic.

Friends
12 Twitter accounts from the TwitDir Top 20 followers are not listed in the Twitterholic top 100 Friends. The number of friends according to TwitDir is higher compared to the numbers of Twitterholic for 5 of the 8 accounts that appear in both lists.

Even Steven Jobs wondered a month ago why his Twitter account is not appearing on Twitterholic. It looks like that TwitDir is the best source of information for Twitter Top 20 lists.

TwitDir has launched a little game, they want us to guess how many public Twitter accounts there are. This number has to be greater than 120k according to one of the guesses. I created a Twitter account for testing two months ago. I haven't published anything on this account, there are no followers, nor did I add friends. I was really surprised to notice that TwitDir was able to find this account. TwitDir seems to have access to the complete list of Twitter accounts. I am really curious to know the number of Twitter accounts.