Twitter - number of tweets per day

Some people would like to know the answer to questions such as "how many users are there in the Twitter community", "how many Twitter messages have been published since the start", "how many Twitter messages are published every day" … Unfortunately, I have not yet found a source with correct and reliable answers to all these questions.

Two weeks ago I discovered the stats page of Twittertroll. Twittertroll describes itself as "the coolest real-time Twitter search engine!". This week I had a look again at their stats page and I was surprized to see the evolution of the number of Twitter messages (tweets) indexed by Twittertroll by day. This number was going doing, pretty hard.


As the Twittertroll stats page only shows the number of tweets for the last seven days, I looked for sources to find number of tweets for the prevous days. Luckely I was able to find a previous version of the Twittertroll stats page in the Google cache and also a printscreen in a message on the Twittown blog. The graph below shows the number of Twitter messages indexed by Twittertroll by day since June 9, 2007.


My question was wether the TwitterTroll data reflected the actual situation. Was there indeed a sharp decline in number of Twitter messages ? Was Twitter really in trouble ?

There is another source of information regarding number of Twitter messages published in the Twitter public timeline. Twitterment, the search engine from eBiquity, not only shows on its stats page graphs of the total number of tweets indexed by Twitterment, but it also publishes the total number of indexed tweets. Comparing the number of indexed tweets for different dates allows to get an idea about the number of tweets per day. I found again several sources where a copy of the Twitterment stats page was kept :
Twittown post - April 13, 2007 - 368103
Google cache - June 4, 2007 - 1633713
Twitterfacts post - June 8, 2007 - 1751613
Live.com cache - June 18, 2007 - 1988173
Own observation - June 19, 2007 around 12:00 PM (CET) - 2014643
Own observation - June 20, 2007 around 12:00 PM (CET) - 2042493


Making the difference of the number of indexed tweets and dividing this difference by the number of days between the two dates gives the average number of tweets per day, as shown in the graph below.


Conclusion : the number of tweets per day is not in sharp decline as may be suggested by the Twittertroll stats page. It is clear from the graphs above that Twittertroll is only indexing about one third of the tweets indexed by Twitterment (8500 compared to 25000). As there is no other source to verify, it is impossible to tell if the number of tweets indexed by Twitterment is the correct number of tweets in the Twitter public timeline. Perhaps the people from Twitter.inc can show some light on global statistics.

Twitter search engines

I just noticed an announcement of Twittertroll, another Twitter search engine. As I have seen similar announcements, I found it worthwhile to have a closer look at several sites offering specific search functions for the Twitosphere.


Name : Twittersearch
URL : twittermap.com/search
Author : twitter.com/davetroy
Announcement : here
Launched : March 15, 2007
Description : Twitter zeitgeist will be searched and displayed.
Number of messages indexed : only a moving window of a limited number of days
Results of query "paris hilton" : 210 messages



Name : Twitterment, What are we twittering?
URL : twitterment.umbc.edu
Author : ebiquity.umbc.edu
Announcement : here
Launched : April 11, 2007
Description : Twitterment provides a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API.
Number of messages indexed : over 1,7 million posts, since April 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : 407 messages



Name : Twitter.FM, Search what world's people are doing!
URL : twitter.fm
Author : twitter.com/ohkura
Announcement : here
Launched : April 29, 2007
Description : Simple but multilingual full text search engine for Twitter, supports CJK, Arabic, etc. Country specified search is also provided.
Number of messages indexed : ?
Results of query "paris hilton" : 20 messages



Name : TwitterTroll.com, the only real-time Twitter search engine!
URL : twittertroll.com
Author : twitter.com/williamsba
Announcement : here
Launched : June 4, 2007
Description : TwitterTroll.com indexes tweets from the public timeline. We index a large majority of tweets, but can not guarantee all tweets will be indexed.
Number of messages indexed : already over 75,000, since June 4, 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : 83 messages


I discovered that several sites mentioned in an previous post on this blog (Monitoring the buzz in the Twitosphere) have stopped working. I have added information below for two sites that used to offer search. Perhaps they will back in a short while.


Name : Twitterverse, What is Twitter Doing Today
URL : www.twitterverse.com
Author : twitter.com/tw1tterverse
Announcement : here
Launched : April 9, 2007
Description : Twitterverse displays popular words based on time and popularity.
Number of messages indexed : down since May 11, 2007
Results of query "paris hilton" : no results



Name : Twitterbuzz, what are people linking to from Twitter
URL : twitterbuzz.com
Author : twitter.com/rsynnott
Announcement : here
Launched : March 19, 2007
Description : TwitterBuzz collects links that are mentioned on Twitter and arranges them in order of popularity. You can view links mentioned in the last hour, day, week, or forever (since archival started).
Number of messages indexed : no results shown
Results of query "paris hilton" : no results


The table below shows the traffic rankings for Twitter.com and the Twitter search engines mentioned above. Web traffic to the Twitter search engines seems to be limited.


If you cannot find the Twitter messages what you are looking for using one or more of the above mentioned Twitter search engines, you can always use one of the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Live.com, ... as they have also indexed Twitter.com :
Google.com : 693,000 pages
Yahoo.com : 229,000 pages
Live.com : 140,000 pages

Twitter messages per day - Twitterment stats

Twitterment, a search interface over an index of recent updates obtained periodically from the public timeline API, has a page with statistics about Twitter messages, also known as Tweets.



The total number of indexed Twitter messages by Twitterment is 1,751,613. As indicated on the graphs, the number of Twitter messages per hour is slighty above 70,000, the number of Twitter messages per day is between 200,000 and 275.000. As the Twitter public timeline only contains messages from public Twitter accounts, Twitterment has only data about public Twitter accounts and no data about private Twitter accounts.

A day counts 24 hours, so 70,000 messages per hour times 24 gives roughly 1.7 million Twitter messages, approximately the total number of Twitter messages indexed by Twitterment.

A week counts 7 days, so 240,000 messages per day times 7 gives roughly 1.7 million Twitter messages, again approximately the total number of Twitter messages indexed by Twitterment.

The Twitterment graphs do not show the average number of Twitter messages per hour or per day, they show the total number of Twitter messages indexed by Twitterment divided per hour and per day. The graphs do not give a direct indication of the average number per hour of day.

Perhaps an estimation of the number of Twitter messages per day can be made by looking at the graph of Twitter messages per weekday, comparing the heights per day. Assuming that the number of Twitter messages from Monday till Friday is about the same, the graph for today shows that the column for Friday is about 25,000 units lower.



On May 15, I published a post with a screenshot from Twitterment showing the number of Twitter messages per day. The difference between the heigths of the columns for Monday and Thuesday and the other days of the week is again about 25,000.



Twitterment was announced on April 4, 2007, more than 2 months ago. It started indexing Twitter messages probably from the beginning of April 2007. The total number of indexed Twitter messages by Twitterment (1,751,613) divided by the derived number of messages a day (25,000) gives 70, about the number of days between beginning of April and now. This confirms again that the figure of 25,000 public Twitter messages per day seems likely.

Traces of a Twitter User

If a Twitter user does not indicate that he wants his account to be visible only to his friends, all his Twitter messages can be read by anyone. To get an idea what someone is twittering about, you can have a loop at at his personal Twitter page. Twitter is also indexed by Google - with a very high pagerank - meaning that you can search specific words or phrases for a given Twitter user. There are two services that allow you to have a closer look at the traces of a Twitter user.

First let's have a look at the Twitter page of a random chosen Belgian Twitter user, Bart De Waele. He seems quite active with over 1000 updates. He is also popular in Belgium, having 54 friends and 106 followers. By the way, I know Bart personally and I am one of his Twitterfriends.


Twitterment is an initiative of the eBiquity Research Group at the University in Maryland Baltimore County. Twitterment scans Twitter messages from the Twitter public timeline. They have recently added the possibility to search Twitter messages by author. What does Twitterment reveal about Bart De Waele ?

- last messages : of Bart's over 1000 messages, only 192 are indexed by Twitterment


- hourly trends : at what time of the day is this author twittering ?


- daily trends : at what days of the week is this author twittering ?


- tagcloud : what are the most frequently used words in his messages ?


Twitterholic generates top 100 lists of Twitter users by number of followers, number of friends and number of updates. If you take a closer look, you can get some details for each of the users listed in the top 100 lists, and even for other users. Bart De Waele is not yet in one of the Twitterholic top 100 lists, but Twitterholic has some information about his Twitter account. Twitterholic shows a trendline for the number of followers and provides a detailed overview of the number of followers, friends, updates and favorites for the last month.


These graphs from both sources are not available for all Twitter users. For instance, my Twitter account (BVLG) is not showing up yet in both sources, although it is public.

If you want to find out yourself what these services know about you, you can use the URLs below. Substitute XXXXXX with your Twitter Username.
http://twitterment.umbc.edu/results.jsp?query=author:XXXXXX&maxresults=50
http://twitterholic.com/twitter/XXXXXX

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.