I find it shocking that so many people rely on a single (centralized) source for their communication. The internet was built to be de-centralized (see how DNS, email, tcp/ip works), but now we are moving to a centralized, unreliable means of communication..
Haven't we been doing that for ages with things like MSN/AOL messenger? Isn't this just an extra means of communication, instead of a replacement as you're suggesting?
Before there was ICQ, AIM, YIM, and AOL instant messenger, there was talk, zephyr and other distributed instant message systems that worked just fine over the internet.
But there is a single company in charge of the service... if that company disappears or the company servers shut off, your messages will disappear (just as it happens when twitter shuts off).
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but IM is about as far from distributed as it gets. There are only 3-4 big players in a given country, on the high side. Better than Twitter maybe, but just barely.
It's pretty hard to draw any conclusions at all from this.
The number is very low compared with other communication mediums - IRC, IM, SMS, Email, facebook. Clearly they've grown well, but they have a long way to go yet.
The other point is that a large(ish) proportion of twitter seems to be bots and automated tweeting. It's hard to guess how much though.
>> "These numbers are definitely noteworthy and provide evidence against the perception that Twitter is not growing"
It doesn't provide any insight into what is growing though. Are people genuinely using twitter more, or are bots using it more, spammers, PR etc
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.4 ms ] threadBut
2,500,000,000 text messages are sent each day in the USA through wireless networks when measured in early 2009.
Source:
http://www.textmessageblog.mobi/2009/02/19/text-message-stat...
http://www.freetext.com/blogs/ringtones/over-one-trillion-te...
And 25 million tweets sent via text message is probably a high estimate.
Only if you assume everyone has zero followers (who receive tweets via SMS).
Except strictly speaking executing a search is also producing content, of course - but only Google knows it.
After, there's XMPP.
The number is very low compared with other communication mediums - IRC, IM, SMS, Email, facebook. Clearly they've grown well, but they have a long way to go yet.
The other point is that a large(ish) proportion of twitter seems to be bots and automated tweeting. It's hard to guess how much though.
>> "These numbers are definitely noteworthy and provide evidence against the perception that Twitter is not growing"
It doesn't provide any insight into what is growing though. Are people genuinely using twitter more, or are bots using it more, spammers, PR etc
Yeah call me crazy, but I expect there's a large amount of spam, bots, auto reposters, etc included in there.
It's hardly a trivial thing to identify and remove spam. Especially where your data is limited to 140 characters.
The other question would be are retweets included in the total.