December 31, 2007

Top 10 posts

As a last post on this blog in 2007, I want to share the 10 most viewed pages on this blog of the past year.

  1. Number of Twitter users, July 22, 2007
  2. 4 Types of Twitter Users, May 23, 2007
  3. Second state of the DutchTwitosphere, August 21, 2007
  4. First State of the Dutch Twitosphere, April 23, 2007
  5. Virtual travel agent on Twitter, August 22, 2007
  6. First State of the Italian Twitosphere, May 7, 2007
  7. Private Twitter accounts visible on Facebook, September 8, 2007
  8. First state of the Twitosphere in Canada, December 18, 2007
  9. First state of the Twitosphere in Brazil, August 15, 2007
  10. First state of the Twitosphere in Argentina, October 4, 2007
I also would like to share the 10 least popular posts.
  1. Twitter : Buzz statistics from public sources, June 28, 2007
  2. Tweeterboard, December 19, 2007
  3. Twitterposter, November 7, 2007
  4. Twitter Down, June 22, 2007
  5. Followers, Friends, Fans, Admirers, Connections, Subscribers, Visitors, ..., September 17, 2007
  6. TwitterWhere, October 25, 2007
  7. The case for Twittter - The case against Twitter, May 2, 2007
  8. Sitevolume, August 10, 2007
  9. Twitter shares, August 14, 2007
  10. Club140, December 6, 2007
I hope that you will keep on reading the posts on this blog in 2008.

Source : Google analytics stats

December 29, 2007

Most popular Twitter bookmarks on del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where users can share their bookmarks. Six months ago I already posted an overview of the number of del.icio.us bookmarks for Twitter related URLs (Twitter itself, Twitter tools, Twitter gadgets, Twitter blogs, ...).

I just had a look at the number of bookmarks for these Twitter related URLs. The list below shows the 10 most popular Twitter related URLs according to the number of del.icio.us bookmarks.

  1. Twittervision : 2866 bookmarks, first bookmark on March 17, 2007


  2. Twitterific : 899 bookmarks, first bookmark on January 15, 2007


  3. Twitter Fan Wiki : 893 bookmarks, first bookmark on November 20, 2006


  4. Twitterfeed : 778 bookmarks, first bookmark on March 22, 2007


  5. Twitbin : 563 bookmarks, first bookmark on May 4, 2007


  6. Foamee : 401 bookmarks, first bookmark on November 9, 2007


  7. Twitthis : 396 bookmarks, first bookmark on March 22, 2007


  8. Snitter : 372 bookmarks, first bookmark on September 4, 2007


  9. Terraminds micro search : 341 bookmarks, first bookmark on Augustus 20, 2007


  10. Twitterposter : 327 bookmarks, first bookmark on October 31, 2007

Do you agree that this list is a true representation of the most popular Twitter tools ?

December 26, 2007

First State of the Twitosphere in India

I published already several blogposts on this blog analyzing the Twitosphere is several European and South American countries (see the sidebar). Last week I had a close look at the twitosphere in Canada. The next country analyzed - the first country in Asia - is India.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 1631 active Twitter accounts in India. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from India if the location explicitely refers to India or if the Twitter user was located in India according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Twitter users in India is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For an estimated population of 1.12 billion people (according to Wikipedia), India has 1631 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Twitter account in India for every 687,000 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for less then 10,000 inhabitants. For Canada there is a Twitter account for every 10,014 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in India
This graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts in India. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts in India.


Oldest Twitter accounts from India
http://twitter.com/pajama - Pajama Pockets - first message on 28/07/2006
http://twitter.com/harshadsharma - Harshad Sharma - first message on 2/08/2006
http://twitter.com/Kalyan - Kalyan Sagar - first message on 14/08/2006
http://twitter.com/hardik - Hardik Shah - first message on 27/08/2006
http://twitter.com/Dolly - Dolly - first message on 31/08/2006

Public of Private
257 Twitter acounts from India or 15.8% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium). In Canada 7.1% of the Twitter accounts were private accounts.

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 36% of the Twitter accounts in India do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from India follows 10 Twitter users. An average Canadian Twitter account follows 23 Twitters accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy).


Top 5
http://twitter.com/vijay - Vijay - 1,435 following
http://twitter.com/Gauravonomics - Gaurav Mishra - 972 following
http://twitter.com/GharExpert - GharExpert - 799 following
http://twitter.com/regalfinance - regalfinance - 635 following
http://twitter.com/RaviKarandeekar - Ravi Karandeekar - 521 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 25% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from India has 8 followers. This average is far below the average for Canada (25 followers).


Top 5
http://twitter.com/Gauravonomics - Gaurav Mishra - 276 followers
http://twitter.com/drmani - Dr Mani - 247 followers
http://twitter.com/labnol - Amit Agarwal - 213 followers
http://twitter.com/kiruba - Kiruba Shankar - 208 followers
http://twitter.com/abdulqabiz - Abdul Qabiz - 176 followers

Updates
10% of the accounts from India are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from India has 88 updates. This is again significantly lower than the average for the Canadian twitosphere. The top 2 Twitter accounts are non human, meaning that the messages are automatically generated. In other countries I discovered more automated Twitter accounts.


Top 5
http://twitter.com/indianews - India News - 39,831 updates
http://twitter.com/PHP_programmer - onlinejobsforall.com - 10,053 updates
http://twitter.com/bluepotion - Manasa Malipeddi - 2,224 updates
http://twitter.com/aalaap - Aalaap Ghag - 1,827 updates
http://twitter.com/prsn - Prasoon - 1,756 updates

Degree of activity
60% of all Twitter accounts from India with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts. In Canada the percentage of inactive Twitter accounts was 46%.

27% of all Twitter accounts from India with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive. In Canada the percentage of active Twitter accounts was 38%.

Conclusion
This state of the Twitosphere in India 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 (following/followers) and of course new messages being written every hour of the day.

Users from India were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). From March 2007 the growth in the twitosphere in India accelerated. The growth of new Twitter user accounts in India remained at the same speed from March 2007 until now.

The degree of activity in the twitosphere in India is lower than in the other analyzed countries. The percentage of active Twitter users, the number of Twitters users followed and being followed, the number of updates (Twitter messages published), the number of non human Twitter accounts are all significantly lower compared to Canada and several European countries.

For a country with a huge population (estimated at 1.12 billion), the number of Twitter users is surprisingly low. Especially because India is known for its IT workforce. There are a lot of IT specialists from India working in the USA and in Europe. I have the impression that the IT workforce within India does not use Twitter to communicate intensively with their colleagues working abroad.

December 19, 2007

Tweeterboard

Tweeterboard is a way of looking at who is influential on Twitter based on their conversations with other Twitter users. Services showing how many followers a Twitter user has and how many Twitter users a Twitter user is following have been around a long time. Examples of these services are Twitterholic, Twitterposter, Twitdir and Terraminds Twitter Search.

The basic idea of Tweeterboard is that conversations - which Twitter user talks to other Twitter users - is according to the people behind Tweeterboard a better measure of influence and engagement than followers, friends and update frequency. The reputation of a Twitter user is calculated based on who talks (links) to this user. Tweeterboard is currently aware of about 2600 users, of which 1500 or so are active Twitter users with public updates.

You can have a look at the top 100 list published by Tweeterboard. This list is still pretty volatile.



Tweeterboard has implemented a very interesting concept, although it is unclear how the metrics are derived. As soon as there is more clarity in how the metrics are calculated, it is quite likely that some Twitter users will try to score high in the ranking (using SEO-like tactics).



2600 users is only a small subset of the complete twitosphere. Twitdir reported today 685,000 Twitters users with a public profile. As shown in a previous post on this blog a long tail effect can be observed in the twitosphere. Only a small subset of users have high values for the traditional metrics (following, followers, updates).

Twitter users have sometimes good reasons to keep their messages private. Twitter offers the possibilty to its users to declare their account private. Only accepted users are able to read the messages of private Twitter accounts. The private nature of a specific Twitter account does not exclude that this Twitter user can be very influential within his community of followers. Tweeterboard is only able to trace the public influence of Twitter users. Replies from public Twitter accounts to messages from private Twitter accounts are captured. The original messages however remain inaccessible to Tweeterboard.

Twitter is a global community. At the same time there are numerous subcommunities within the global twitosphere. Each of these subcommunities has its own dynamics. You can get an idea of this dynamics by browsing thru the different states of the twitosphere by country I already published on this blog (see the side bar). The subcommunities - often by topic, by language or by country - have members who are also connected to other subcommunities, resulting in subcommunities that are often interlinked. Examples of subcommunities are the Twitter users from the Netherlands (see which Twitter users TwitterNL is following), the Twitter users from Argentina (see Tuitiar), the Spanish speaking Twitter users (see TuitHispana), the Twitter users from Madrid (see Twittmad).

It would be interesting to see the influence rankings not only on a global level - as presented on the current top 100 page - but also by subcommunity. Companies only active in a specific geographical location (a continent, a country or even on a lower level) are not always interested in who's influential on Twitter on a global scale, but rather on who's influential with their geographical location and perhaps also domain of activity. It will be a real challenge to draw clear boundaries around subcommunities.

One final remark, the developers of Tweeterboard still have to fix some loose ends. While trying to find out the metrics for specific users (within my subcommunity), I sometimes got error messages.

December 18, 2007

First state of the Twitosphere in Canada

I published already several blogposts on this blog analyzing the Twitosphere is several European and South American countries (see the sidebar). The next country analyzed is Canada.

Using the same approach as for the previous countries, I managed to find 3307 active Twitter accounts from Canada. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from Canada if the location explicitely refers to Canada or if the Twitter user was located in Canada according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Canadian Twitter users is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 33.126 million people (according to Wikipedia), Canada has 3307 Twitter accounts, meaning that there is a Canadian Twitter account for every 10,014 inhabitants. Currently for Iceland and the Netherlands there is one Twitter account for less then 10,000 inhabitants.

History of the Canadian Twitter accounts
This graph below shows the history of the Canadian Twitter accounts. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Canadian Twitter accounts.


Oldest Twitter accounts from Canada
http://twitter.com/Dick - Dick - first message on 13/07/2006
http://twitter.com/astroboy - astro - first message on 14/07/2006
http://twitter.com/velkr0 - velkr0 - first message on 16/07/2006
http://twitter.com/sonson - sonson - first message on 17/07/2006
http://twitter.com/SteveDinn - Steve Dinn - first message on 17/07/2006

Public of Private
Only 234 Twitter acounts from Canada or 7.1% have chosen to keep their updates only available to their friends. In the analyzed European countries this percentage varied from 3.5% (Italy) to 22% (Belgium).

Number of following
A Twitter user can choose to follow one or more other Twitter accounts, called "following". 16% of the Canadian Twitter accounts do not follow other Twitter users. An average Twitter account from Canada follows 23 Twitter accounts. In the analyzed European countries this average varied from 9.6 (Belgium) to 32 (Italy).



Top 5
http://twitter.com/Tolchock - Maki - 2.473 following
http://twitter.com/ambermacarthur - amber mac - 1.560 following
http://twitter.com/lisamac - Lisa McMillan - 937 following
http://twitter.com/trishussey - Tris Hussey - 920 following
http://twitter.com/MatthewDaniels - Matthew Daniels - 795 following

Number of followers
A follower is someone who has indicated another Twitter account as following and receives all updates of that other Twitter account. 7% of the accounts have no Twitter followers at all, meaning that no one else on Twitter has indicated this account as following. An average Twitter account from Canada has 25 followers. This average is in line with the averages observed for the European countries : between 10.5 (Belgium) to 26 (Italy).



Top 5
http://twitter.com/ambermacarthur - amber mac - 3.639 followers
http://twitter.com/snookca - Snook - 1.171 followers
http://twitter.com/lisamac - Lisa McMillan - 840 followers
http://twitter.com/mezzoblue - Dave Shea - 826 followers
http://twitter.com/willpate - Will Pate - 815 followers

Updates
Only 3% of the accounts from Canada are still waiting for their first update to be published. Currently an average Twitter account from Canada has 188 updates, which is higher than the averages observed for the European countries from 72 (Belgium) to 106 (Italy and Spain). The analysis for the European countries was done several months ago. The averages have probably increased by now.

The relatively high average number of updates can be explained by several very active Twitter accounts. Some of them are from a human twitterer, others however are from an automated source. 50% of the Twitter users in Canada had less then 34 updates.



Top 5 human twitterers
http://twitter.com/definetheline - Michael Mistretta - 9.366 updates
http://twitter.com/Chris24 - Chris Thomson - 9.254 updates
http://twitter.com/bunneh - bunneh - 4.704 updates
http://twitter.com/darylcognito - daryl n cognito - 4.556 updates
http://twitter.com/ChadOhman - Chad Ohman - 4.467 updates

Top 5 non human twitterers
http://twitter.com/mylesb - Myles Braithwaite - 54.632 updates
http://twitter.com/WTL_iTunes - WTL's iTunes - 19.529 updates
http://twitter.com/globeandmail - globeandmail - 5.367 updates
http://twitter.com/Vancouver_News - Vancouver News - 5.050 updates
http://twitter.com/hfx_ben - ben tremblay - 3.344 updates

Degree of activity
46% of all Twitter accounts from Canada with a public feed did not post an update in the last 30 days. They can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

38% of all Twitter accounts from Canada with a public feed did post at least one message in the last 7 days, indicating that these accounts are still alive.

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

Users from Canada were among the first to start using Twitter (from July 2006). From November 2006 the number of users increased at an higher rate. From April 2007 the growth in the Canadian twitosphere accelerated further. The growth of new Twitter user accounts in Canada slowed a little bit down afterwards. Surprisingly the growth remained at the same speed from June 2007 until now.

December 14, 2007

Twittering for a good cause

Bart Dewaele, one of the Twitter Stars of Belgium, is selling his next tweet, number 3000, to the highest bidder.

The money Bart will raise with the sale of this special tweet will go to the music for life initiative of Studio Brussel, a Belgian radio station and the Red Cross. This year the music for life initiative pays attention to the lack of drink water for too many people on this planet.

Currently the highest bid is 400 euros or 587 US dollars.

December 6, 2007

Club140

Dave Winner launched club140. He is keeping track of people he follows who have posted "perfect" Twitter messages, ones that are exactly 140 characters long. If you want to be part of the game, send David Winer a direct message and he will probably follow you.