The growth of Twitter – now 50 million messages per day

February 23, 2010 By 2 Comments

If you want evidence of the sheer amount of content and data being created by Twitter, look no further than the evidence provided by Twitter analytics team member Kevin Weil on the official Twitter blog.

In 2007, Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times per day.

In 2008, Twitter users were tweeting 300,000 times per day.

In 2009 Twitter users were tweeting 2.5 million per day, and it grew 1400% to 35 million per day.

And in 2010? Twitter users are tweeting 50 million times per day, which works out at 600 tweets per second.

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Kevin goes on to mention Tweet deliveries as a much higher metric, and also says that the team will make time to share more info on ways to measure and understand the information network.

50 million messages is an interesting figure considering the measurements of web-based Twitter usage are pinned at around 55 million, and several studies indicate there’s a high churn rate of new users and a high proportion of dormant accounts – it indicates those that ‘get’ Twitter tend to share a pretty high amount of information. Which isn’t unusual, considering the same curve correlates with the amount of bloggers regularly updating, for example.

It also reinforces why tweets are becoming integrated into search tools from Google, Bing and many more.

Filed Under: statistics, twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

The Social Psycho project – interesting questions…

April 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The always interesting Marcus Brown has initiated  ‘Social Psycho, a Creative Commons project’ – which is a crowdsourced work/works of fiction around some interesting questions relating to our increasingly social and networked world.

Social Psycho

View more presentations from The Kaiser.

Dave Cushman has already started thinking about it a bit. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but one interesting example to look at is Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transcience, which I wrote about back in 2007.

(Incidentally, anyone know how to stop my formatting going bonkers if I’ve embedded a Slideshare presentation?)

(Edit…I seem to have located a lot of random /div tags which were causing it..)

Filed Under: Digital Culture, social networks Tagged With: , , , ,

When data can take your breath away

March 25, 2009 By 2 Comments

Wow.

Click through to Youtube to watch the video below in all it’s full-sized glory.

It’s a 24 hour observation of large airline flights condensed into just over a minute, found via Musings of an Opinionated Sod. And his closing sentence beautiful sums up how the ways we produce great content can, will, and has changed, whether it’s editorial, advertising or marketing, by making so much more information and so many more tools available:

‘If we open our eyes enough, we can see there’s real beauty in information, not to mention the fact we can make information, beautiful.’

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Why Twitter won’t replace Google search- but will overtake it

February 16, 2009 By 4 Comments

The reason why Twitter and real-time information will overtake Google search isn’t because of the aggregation of the ‘Thought stream’ as Techcrunch has proposed, as Lew Moorman has written, or even as Robert Scoble has written.

For some reason, we still think that a new service will totally replace the old, and that the two compete on the same field, even though Robert’s post alluded to where I see the real advantage for real-time information.

Google provides signposts for where you want to go. Twitter provides you with a guided tour by your friends.

Signpost by JCM_Photos on Flickr

Signpost by JMC_Photos on Flickr (CC Licence)

It’s not about searching the aggregate of real-time information.

It’s about asking the members of your network in real-time for responses.

And it’s about increasingly moving towards Vendor Relationship Management, rather than Customer Relationship Management.

I don’t care as much about the general consensus of the population of Twitter about a subject as often as I care about the opinions of the core group of my 2300 followers on the specific question I’ve posed.

And that’s where the threat to Google occurs. As a normal Twitter user, I’ll occasionally look at what the general populace reports around breaking news or a major event. But it’s the closer network within my followers who provide the real value of responding in minutes, or even seconds, to my requests and questions.

It allows people (and one day, perhaps companies), to come to me with the information I need, rather than setting out on my own to try to navigate my way to what I need.

Real-time web allows me to ask for information and have it brought to me by my core group of contacts and relevant people/companies. That’s the real-time benefit – not in evolving search.

But this doesn’t mean that there is no need for search.

Guided Tours by friends don’t remove the need for signposts, for example when friends aren’t available.

I’m already finding that I use search far, far less than ever before.

Real time search is only really valuable when there is a need to guage public opinion for businesses, marketeers, journalists, writers etc. (the last two refer to print, web, blog, tv, radio, mobile).

So trust me to choose search, questioning friends, or real-time search when it’s appropriate for what I want to do, and don’t rip up all the singposts in case I don’t know anyone in a particular town!

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