Monday, December 20, 2010

Twitter Back in the Day




remember Twitter back int the day?


Thursday, December 16, 2010

Twitter Now Worth $3.7 Twitter Now Worth $3.7 Billion

Twitter has received a $200 million infusion led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the premier venture capital firms in the world, and a key early-stage investor in a little company called Google.

Kara Swisher at AllThingsD broke the news (again).

The new investment round reinforces Twitter is one of the most important communications companies in the world, often mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, the 800-pound social media gorilla which has about 10 times the valuation. On paper Twitter is now theoretically worth more than even The New York Times, whose parent company is publicly traded.

In the last year Twitter users sent 25 billion tweets and the company added 100 million new accounts. Twitter now employs over 350 people, up from 130 a year ago.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/12/twitter-raise

Thursday, October 14, 2010

google - twitter?



Google is getting more and more friendly with Twitter, and the Twitterverse is awash with rumors of a Google Twitter buy-out. This is very strongly denied by Twitter-bosses but it is fair to say that Google is trying to become more social. Now, Google is running a new experiment where for a select number of users, a twitter integration box will be revealed.

 from REv2 .org
http://www.rev2.org/2010/10/11/google-trialling-twitter-integration/

Monday, August 2, 2010

Sunday, August 1, 2010

20 billion tweets and counting - Aug 1st 2010

There have now been more than 20 billion tweets since Twitter’s inception, according to tracking service GigaTweet.

The milestone comes just two months after the service hit 15 billion tweets and about five months since it reached 10 billion, indicating that activity levels on the microblogging service continue to accelerate.

While GigaTweet’s count is unofficial, Twitter indicated earlier this year that they’re seeing more than 50 million tweets per day. With the company recently breaking its own activity records during the World Cup, we imagine the numbers are fairly accurate.

up to date numbers - counter here

Friday, July 23, 2010

FaceBook reaches 500 million members

Facebook reached its 500 million member milestone yesterday and celebrated the event with the launch of Facebook Stories. The monumental moment also played a role in the ABC World News report featuring a candid interview between Diane Sawyer and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

 Info Graphic for facebook - click here

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

800 million queries a day on twitter

Twitter is supporting 800 million queries a day, or 33 percent more than it said it was handling back in April, according to co-founder Biz Stone, who spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival today.


That means the company, which is trying to brand itself as an “information network” rather than a social network, is handling 24 billion queries a month. The last time the company reported daily search volumes was back in April at its inaugural developer conference, Chirp, when it said it was supporting 600 million queries a day.

It’s hard to compare Twitter’s monthly query volume to that of Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, since worldwide figures for their traffic are fairly old. Comscore reported that Bing was supporting 4.1 billion monthly queries worldwide while Yahoo was handling 9.4 billion in December.

linksocial.venturebeat.com

Monday, July 5, 2010

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

3,283 Tweets Per Second

Despite massive Twitter activity due to ongoing World Cup match play, Twitter’s biggest tweets per second record to date was during last week’s NBA finals. That record was shattered yesterday as Twitter users published 3,283 tweets per second at the close of Japan’s victory over Denwark in the World Cup.
These new numbers come directly from Twitter (Twitter). You may recall that the previous record of 3,085 tweets per second came at the close of the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Boston Celtics on June 17.
Both of these recent records are staggering given that Twitter — during normal daily activity — averages roughly 750 tweets per second. The Japan-Demark World Cup figure means that activity swelled 438% above average, which helps to put recent service issues into perspective.
Still the World Cup has yet to reach its climatic finale, so we expect this record broken in the very near future.

mashable

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Twitter hits 2 billion tweets per month

According to Twitter CTO Dick Costolo, about 65 million tweets are sent on Twitter each day. This equates to roughly 1.96 billion tweets per month, a stat that’s corroborated by Pingdom’s estimate of 2 billion tweets per month.
Just over a week ago, we reported that Twitter hit the 15 billion tweet mark. The service announced its ten billionth tweet just a few months before that, and hit the one billion tweet milestone back in the fall of 2008. Twitter’s growth curve is clearly accelerating.
Costolo also stated that the service sees around 135,000 new registrations each day; we’re not sure how many of those new users are unique people versus new accounts for business or other purposes. Another unknown is exactly how many of these registrations end up being regular users of the service and how many accounts drop off after a month or two.

Mashable

 

Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day













Twitter COO Dick Cosotolo offered some updated stats at the Conversational Media Summit today in New York City. Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

TECHCRUNCH

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Twitter TOP Video Influencer

 

twitter video referral

 stats  shown by video measurement company TubeMogul show that Twitter is quickly growing as a top referrer for web video traffic, far outpacing Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Bing.

 

Monday, May 24, 2010

The Big Bang in twitter -via mashable and infographic

n March 21, 2006, Twitter’s founders published their first tweets. If you look at that moment as a big bang of influence in the ever-expanding Twittersphere, how does Twitter’s cosmos look today? Web design studio Information Architects aims to answer that with an enormous visualization of the Cosmic 140, or the 140 most influential users on Twitter.The map may look a bit chaotic at first, but it’s not. The founders of Twitter are at the very center of the “galaxy”; longtime Twitter users are closer to the middle, and the two circles for each user (the white one and the transparent one) represent list volume and the number of followers respectively. Users are organized around the circle according to category (indicated on the outer rim of the sphere), such as sports, politics, humor and so forth. Additionally, you can see the first tweet of each user on the map.
As hard as it is to determine the exact level of influence of individual Twitter users, the visualization is an amazing sight to behold. It’s huge, complex and beautiful.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Twitter’s role in Bangkok conflict unprecedented

A few weeks ago, when it was safe and sane to go for dinner in the middle of Bangkok, some colleagues and I were in the middle of dinner at a Japanese restaurant when a loud boom was heard in the distance.

All of three of us reached immediately for our BlackBerries. A year ago, we might have e-mailed our editors to see what the news wires were reporting, or checked a television set for an update. But in Thailand's fast-moving and violent political crisis, there was no time to wait for those “old media” to tell us what was going on.


What we needed to know was: What were people tweeting?

The information came fast and dubious. Two explosions had been heard near the top of Silom Road financial street, where supporters of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva had been gathering at the southern end of the sprawling Red Shirt anti-government protest camp that consumed much of the centre of Bangkok.

Someone tweeted that the sounds were made by bomb blasts, which would have been a serious escalation in the violence. Others suggested they might just be fireworks, which Red Shirts regularly used to target helicopters and light up roofs of buildings where snipers might be hiding. Eventually, the number of tweets about people injured on Silom Road became a body of evidence too large to ignore. We abandoned our sushi and headed to the scene.

Never before has a social media website played the kind of role in a conflict that Twitter has played in Thailand's nine-week-old anti-government uprising, keeping people informed even as it amplified the hate on both sides of the country’s divide. Some say Twitter – or rather its users – may have even saved lives as fighting consumed the streets of Bangkok.

More clearly, it was used by propagandists on both sides to get their message out, and by ordinary Thais to express their frustrations at the situation and to warn each other about which areas of Bangkok to avoid as the city descended into urban warfare. With many websites censored and Thailand's traditional media deeply divided into pro- and anti-government camps, it arguably became the only forum where you could get a clear picture of what was really going on.

“Twitter is the only place where we can say things freely,” said Poomjit Sirawongprasert, an Internet freedom activist who sometimes updates her Twitter feed a dozen times an hour and became one of the go-to sources for information about what was happening in whatever neighbourhood of Bangkok she happened to be in. “The propaganda is not good, but because of the speed, people can check and cross-check. If you put something out there that’s untrue, within 30 minutes the truth will come out because people will show evidence, photos and videos.”

While Twitter was used by the opposition in Iran to organize rallies following last year’s hotly disputed election, it was, for the most part, a one-sided affair with millions of tweets supporting opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi’s claim to have won the vote, and few backing the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Social media was clearly not a field that the mullahs of Tehran understood or felt comfortable playing on.

In Thailand, Red Shirts hoping to bring down the government fought a tweet-for-tweet information war with backers of Mr. Abhisit’s government. Twitter also hosted front-line reports from veteran war correspondents, first-time freelancers and ordinary citizens caught in the crossfire. Some were enthralling; others were invention.

On at least two occasions – one of them when I was trapped inside the supposed sanctuary of the Wat Pathum temple along with more than 3,000 civilians as it came under fire – the social networking site may have played a role in saving lives.

With my colleague Andrew Buncombe unable to move after being shot Wednesday night inside the temple – and other injured people dying around us from lack of medical care – I first telephoned embassies, hospitals and the International Committee for the Red Cross. Then I put out an all-call on Twitter, hoping my “followers” in Bangkok would use their own contacts to help us.

“Please RT,” I wrote, using the shorthand for “retweet,” or spread the word. “People around me are dying because they can't get to hospital across the road because of fighting.” I attached a picture I had taken with my BlackBerry of three wounded men beside me, one of whom appeared near death after being shot in the back.

“More people will die inside Wat Patum unless we get ceasefire to get to hospital across the road,” I added a few minutes later, as my desperation grew.

Within minutes, my pleas had indeed been retweeted hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in English, Thai and other languages. They were posted on the websites of Britain’s The Guardian newspaper and other international media. People I knew only through Twitter started calling me to check on our situation. More helpfully, others started calling embassies, hospitals and the Thai government.

Eighty minutes later, I was carrying stretchers out to a row of waiting ambulances. “Twitter may just have done this,” was my next update.

A similar situation unfolded the next night in another part of Bangkok when a fire broke out in an apartment block in Din Daeng, a neighbourhood that was the scene of full-scale urban warfare for days this week. “People can't get out, b/c soldiers won't allow anyone to walk thru,” tweeted someone using the account of ThaiVisa, a popular online news forum.

As at the temple a day before, the news was passed around hundreds of times, and tweets from inside the burning building were read out on the local television and radio. Ordinary Thais far away from the scene of the blaze called the government and military and begged them to let fire trucks through. In the end, firefighters got through and the people trapped in the building were saved.

“We all become our own news wire service, breaking stories and events instantly. Did [tweets from inside Wat Pathum] prevent a massacre? Maybe they did. Who knows?” wrote Andrew Spooner, a London-based journalist who waded deep into the Thailand story from afar, tweeting about events from a decidedly pro-Red Shirt perspective.

That partisanship was the ugly side of Twitter’s role in the Thai crisis. While the social networking site did perhaps save lives in a few specific instances, Twitter – and the opportunity it gives to instantly broadcast whatever is on your mind, often from behind a cloak of near-anonymity – also gave Thais and foreigners living here the chance to broadcast vitriolic, often hateful, thoughts to the world, raising the temperature inside this already volatile country and arguably helping nudge the situation toward its violent end.

It was common to read comments on my Twitter feed that compared supporters of Mr. Abhisit to Nazis and followers of the Red Shirt movement to livestock. Each hateful comment seemed to provoke an even nastier response, and by the time the nine-week-old protest came to an end, each side was cheering acts of violence against the other.

It would be easy to dismiss the hate speech as irrelevant noise if not for the fact that both the Red Shirt leadership and Mr. Abhisit’s government were both paying rapt attention to what was being said online. The Red Shirts, under their official name, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, had Twitter and Facebook pages that not only distributed announcements from the movement’s leadership, but retweeted some of the venom.

Meanwhile, Mr. Abhisit, who has his own Twitter account and whose aides made clear that they were monitoring tweets about the crisis, was clearly aware of the calls nearly every minute on Twitter for him to order a military crackdown against the Red Shirt encampment in the centre of Bangkok.

Most worrisome for the future is that the hate being spewed online tweet-by-tweet is actually a fairly decent mirror of the sentiments in wider Thai society. While only one in five of Thailand’s 63 million people are online, and far fewer have Twitter accounts, the terrible things written on the site were the same sentiments being muttered on street corners and at dinner parties. Twitter didn’t create the hatred, it amplified it.

“To see what was going on, to see live pictures of things happening like that fire, where people got the word out and got fire trucks to come because of Twitter, that was incredibly important,” said Jodi Ettenberg, a Canadian lawyer living in Bangkok who tweeted about being trapped in the Din Daeng neighbourhood during some of the worst fighting.

“But the vitriol was just astounding. It was shocking to see the kinds of things being said in a public forum. To understand it, you needed to understand the feelings and anger that exist in Thai society.”

Ironically, Thailand’s obsession with Twitter was kick-started by the same man many blame for instigating the country’s ongoing political crisis: fugitive former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Mr. Thaksin, who was ousted in a 2006 military coup and later convicted in absentia of corruption charges, remains widely popular, but has struggled to communicate with his followers due to government influence over the Thai media.

Last summer, he opened up an account, @thaksinlive, and began using it to attack Mr. Abhisit and his government. Those interested in hearing what he had to say – as well as those who wanted to shout back at him – followed him to the social networking site, quickly creating one of Asia’s largest and most politically charged Twitter communities.

“People were not really that interested in Twitter until Thaksin started using it,” said Ms. Poomjit, the Internet freedom activist. “He made it a trend.”

Mr. Thaksin has only tweeted once since the military crackdown began on Wednesday. “I would like to express my condolences to those who are killed and wounded,” he wrote while the fighting was still raging.

Since then, his normally active account has gone silent. But the shouting match he started is only getting louder.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Twitter has 105 miilion users- as of 2010

The company finally revealed its long mysterious registered user number, and it’s surprisingly large (based on some prior outside estimates): 105 million, or to be exact, 105,779,710, according to a slide showing behind co-founder Biz Stone during his opening remarks.

The growth’s not over either — Twitter says they’re still adding 300,000 users per day. Moreover, as many have speculated, most of Twitter’s traffic — 75% of it in fact — comes from third-party clients and applications.

While those numbers still put the company’s user count significantly behind that of Facebook (which recently passed 400 million users) the gap is narrower than many probably perceived.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams at Chirp April 14th 2010 from his keynote address.
  • Twitter gets 3 Billion requests a day through the API
  • According to comScore, that’s about the same traffic as Yahoo (though it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison
  • Growth: 1,500% per year
  • 175 employees
 Today around 37% of active users use Twitter on their phones. More than most other web services, but that should be 100%. There should be people using Twitter only on mobile, eventually. Twitter is built for mobile.

There are about 55 million new tweets being created a day. What does an average user read in a day? It’s a very tiny fraction of what’s available.

600 million search queries a day,


.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Up dated Twitter use (eng;ish less than 44% now)

Twitter was born in the U.S., but American users post just 30% of the tweets, a new study says.
As well, English accounts for less than 44% of tweets, down from 50% in February, says the study from the Paris-based data-analysis firm Semiocast. Researchers followed the Twitter habits of users between March 21 and March 28.
Japanese users accounted for 15% of messages worldwide and 95% of those tweets were in Japanese. Brazilian tweeters made up 12% of posts, while 10% of tweets came from Indonesia and 6% were from the U.K.
Canadian users accounted for about 1% of tweets.

Monday, March 22, 2010

    FROM 11 Points WebSite
    UNgraphs on Twitter
  1. Who's Big On Twitter? - A Venn diagram breaking down different relationships between number of Twitter followers, number of people following you and number of Tweets.

  2. The Most Played Out Jokes About Twitter - Did you ever notice that the word Twitter is only a few letters away from the word twat? I noticed that while eating bad airline food, leaving the toilet seat up, and making some pithy observations about the differences between men and women.

  3. The Best Thing About Celebrities Being On Twitter Is... - A pie chart of different reasons celebrities and Twitter are a glorious match.

  4. Twitter Follower-Following Scatter Plot - Different points hang in the balance of number of followers and number of people you're following.

  5. The Conan O'Brien Paradox - When NBC started screwing with Conan O'Brien, the Twitter community rallied behind one of the hip comic faces of the intelligentsia. But not everything added up for me.

  6. Things You Do On Twitter That Annoy Your Friends - See what behavior is an offense worthy of four-and-a-half Fail Whales.

  7. If I Click On a Trending Topic, What Will I See? - When you click on a trending topic, you see the most recent 20 tweets about that topic. Here's what you should expect to find.

  8. Use of the Word "Your" on Twitter - English's most abused word finds no respite on Twitter.

  9. Reaction to a Celebrity Death, Twitter vs. Mainstream - The way word spreads on the Twitter news cycle is very different than the way it spreads on the mainstream news cycle. Here's a time lapse comparison of the two.

  10. What Happens When You Introduce Someone 55+ To Twitter - The results are never pretty.

  11. Who's Making Money Off Twitter - Some people are. Just not... well...

Thursday, March 4, 2010

how times flies - 10 billionth tweet already

March 4th about 5.00pm Pacific


Tweet #10 billion apparently belongs to a protected user, as API calls won’t allow us to see that specific status update. Via @timdorr, here is Tweet #9,999,999,999 and tweet #10,000,000,001.

via mashable http://bit.ly/dv34G2

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

tweet the 10 billionth(?) tweet


About one year ago Twitter reached a huge milestone: one billion tweets. Four months ago, five billion tweets were served. And now, in about one day, Twitter should reach another very important milestone: 10 billion tweets.

Friday, February 26, 2010

The size of the Internet - today

- There are 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of September 2009.

- There are 1.4 billion e-mail users worldwide, and on average we collectively send 247 billion e-mails per day. Unfortunately 200 billion of those are spam e-mails.

- As of December 2009, there are 234 million websites.

- Facebook gets 260 billion pageviews per month, which equals 6 million page views per minute and 37.4 trillion pageviews in a year.



JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Facebook is now larger than Yahoo in the U.S.

New data released earlier today by web analytics firm Compete.com reveals that there has been a major shift at the top of the web charts: Facebook is now larger than Yahoo in the U.S.

Yahoo for years was the world’s most popular website — its ubiquitous portal has dominated the web since the 90s. Two years ago however, Google vaulted past Yahoo and became the Internet’s most popular destination. Last month, it became Facebook’s turn to knock Yahoo down another peg.

In December 2009, Yahoo garnered 133.45 million visitors in the U.S. Facebook wasn’t far behind with 132.13 million uniques. In the first month of 2010 though, there was a role reversal: Facebook’s traffic rose to 133.62 million visitors, while Yahoo shrunk down to 132.00 million.


Facebook’s shown no signs of stopping its meteoric rise, either. It recently celebrated its 400 millionth user and that number continues to rise in rapid fashion. Now the only website standing between it and web domination is Google.com.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Q: Could Buzz become bigger than Twitter?


A: It already is:


While we can’t pinpoint an exact number, Twitter has probably around 18-25 million users worldwide. Heck, let’s say there are 30 million to be generous. Gmail has over 38 million uniques in the U.S., and that was back in September 2009. Worldwide, that number is simply larger.

Yes, there are far more tweets than comments/posts on Buzz right now, but beating those engagement numbers isn’t out of the question for Buzz.

Q: Could advertisers and brands switch some of their dollars and focus from Facebook and Twitter to Buzz?
A: With millions of people using Buzz, how could they not?

Buzz is already taking a chunk out of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services. That’ll only grow as brands and advertisers better understand what they can do with Buzz and its millions of users. Buzz is equivalent to throwing a giant super magnet into a room filled with nails.


via mashable

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

8 (of many) advantages with Twitter

If you feel like you are getting lost in the shuffle you are not alone. Most people I talk to are trying to use between 6-10 different social sites, I say trying because when you network on multiple social sites at the same time it’s almost impossible to be effective at any of them. It’s no wonder people are lost and confused with how much time they should spend on what site, especially with new social sites popping up everyday.

The question should be, which “one” do I focus on with my time? Twitter is growing fast and many people simply don’t know if they should invest or split their time with another social site. I get asked a few questions over and over again, how can Twitter help me with my business? How does Twitter work? How is Twitter different from other social sites? When used properly you can get more done with greater results in less time from just one central hub social site, “Twitter”. Twitter gives you the ability to locate people looking for what you have to offer.

Let me list a few of the benefits Twitter can offer you or your business:

1. Brand Yourself: Branding yourself and your business using traditional means of advertising would cost you tens of thousands of dollars, with Twitter this is possible with no out of pocket expense and can happen very quickly.

2. Building Relationships: You can build relationships that provides you long term customers. More and more people are shopping online everyday and the sooner you learn how to build relationships online using social sites the sooner you can tap into this growing market.

3. Customer Service: In the offline world this is a problem that is only getting worse. In the online world of Internet marketing this has been reserved for those that could afford the high tech sites. With many 3rd party tools that integrate with Twitter, online customer service is quickly becoming a reality for everyone.

4. Engage: There has never been a time in the history of the Internet where you can invest your time engaging with people that want what you have. Better yet locate your competitors clients.

5. Provide Value: Providing value to both your prospects and customers is a must if you want to hear from them again. People hate to be sold but love to buy. Just one of many, Twitterfeed.com is a 3rd party tool that allows you to provide valuable content to your prospects, customers and followers. Now you can be the information provider without even doing the research.

6. Networking: I have spent thousands of dollars and driven thousands of miles trying to locate people to network with in my business. The thought of going global was out of the question. Now with Twitter there are no limitations, you can network with people locally, nationally and globally if you choose to do so.

7. Research: With Twitter you can research information you need in real time. More and more people I tweet with are sending out questions in the form of a tweet versus going to google. This allows you to interact with people and meet new friends at the same time.

8. Traffic: Traffic Generation to your blog or website worldwide. Most people continue to build their business on a local level but the playing field has leveled. We know people who have generated traffic to their website from over a hundred plus countries within 30 days only using Twitter. Tell me where else can you do that?

http://twitterwatchdog.com

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Twiter December 2009 - via mashable

Just a few months ago, Twitter seemed unstoppable. We argued all the way back in August 2008 that Twitter’s growth could not be stopped. And for a long time, the numbers agreed with us. Twitter grew 752 percent in 2008, but that was nothing compared to the 1,300%+ year-over-year growth in February and March.

Shaq, Oprah, Ashton and CNN all helped lead Twitter to the attention of the mainstream media and countless businesses. The social media company’s growth threatened Facebook () and even affected world politics.

In fact, Twitter still commands the world’s attention, but part of the reason so many people have turned to it is because it’s perceived to be a rapidly growing platform. Unfortunately, the numbers say otherwise.

What will happen to the Twitterverse when more people are aware of these numbers?


Potential Reasons for Twitter’s Flatline




Figuring out why Twitter won’t grow is the billion-dollar question. If the company can’t find a solution, and soon, it will be forced to try more dramatic moves or even allow itself to be acquired.

We’ve heard many potential reasons for the growth ceiling. Here are the ones that make the most sense to us:

- Twitter’s growth isn’t stalling. Rather, these stats aren’t capturing Twitter users utilizing apps, a growing chunk of the Twitterverse.

- Twitter itself has a limited appeal. Only a small amount of people “have something to say” on a consistent basis.

- Twitter’s user retention rate is famously weak. The issue became public in April 2009, but has yet to be solved.

- For many, Twitter hasn’t hit critical mass. Part of why people are on Facebook is because everybody else is on it. We may still be far away from that inflection point for the common Internet user.


What Twitter Needs to Address


We think the true answer behind the Twitter flatline phenomenon lies somewhere within these four reasons. Twitter apps have grown and have become a larger percentage of Twitter’s user base, but even with that factored in, Twitter still has the other three problems.

Twitter has to find a way to expand its appeal, either by adjusting its image in the eyes of the public or by helping change the public into more rabid content creators. It also needs to work on more effective ways to get those who sign up to tweet long after they sign up.

The company has to address these issues before it can attain an undeniable critical mass that will propel its growth again. Without it, Twitter risks marginalization rather than ascension.