May 09, 2008
Twitter in Perspective
Will Woods called the OU twittercrack problem yesterday (Twitters or Twits?), so maybe it's worth just putting twitter into perspective for a minute...? ;-)
Here are the appropriate Alexa traffic rankings (I know, I know, the stats lie because everyone reaches twitter through a client rather than visiting the site itself... just like Second Life lapsed visitors do always convert to regular visitors over 3-5 year period (err..)):
And on Google.... (okay - the stats lie again - everyone is really searching for twitterb*****ks rather than twitter...)
I guess there is something of interest though... Twitter is bigger than the OU - and getting more news...
The Twitter/moodle crossing point is fast approaching too:
And so is the Twitter/Moodle crossing point with Second Life:
Take from all of that what you will...
UPDATE: for a bit more local context, here are the UK trends:
Notice how the search trend appears to lead the news trend early on?
UPDATE 2: What People Say When They Tweet has the following from Summize for April/May 2008:
Summize looked at about 4 million Twitter status update messages (tweets) collected from the public time line over a seven day period running from April 27 - May 3. We saw approximately 200,000 active users (users that sent at least one message) during that period, of which 60% tweeted in English. Japanese was the second most popular language on Twitter with about 9% of the tweets that we gathered.Most strikingly, we found that a whopping 5% of all Twitter (in terms of tweets) is powered by the top 100 active accounts. [A chart suggests 50% of traffic is from top 10k users.] 66% of the users only tweet once per day.
PS did I mention my Tweetspeech - twitter2speech - mashup made the Technology Guardian Twitter feature yesterday? ;-)