February Tweets Forecast: 1.4 Billion

It'd be a big understatement to say that 140-character messages are becoming more common online.  Tweet-related data has been released (and analyzed), proving that rapid growth is taking place, and one prediction even puts the number of tweets that'll be transmitted this month at 1.4 billion.

Believe it or not, Pingdom's forecast is really quite sane.  In December, Twitter passed the billion-tweets-per-month mark.  Then, in January, 1.2 billion tweets were documented.  So 1.4 billion wouldn't represent much more than the continuation of this trend.

As for some other patterns and facts Pingdom observed, a blog post stated, "January 2010 had 16 times as many tweets as January 2009."  Also, "The activity on Twitter has doubled since August 2009."

Then here's one more piece of information to consider: "January 2010 saw more tweets per day (39.5 million) than the whole of September 2008."

Twitter may still have some hurdles to overcome in terms of attracting and retaining users; past figures on those subjects have been a little less remarkable.  But in terms of getting its current user base to become more chatty, it seems that Twitter's meeting with about as much success as anyone could hope for.

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Tweeting Habits Parsed By Time, Day

A new report has shed some light on the habits of Twitter users.  The good people of Pingdom tracked the number of tweets sent over the course of three weeks, and today, released their statistics regarding what days and times folks most like to send messages in under 140 characters.

Some broader facts may be in order first, though.  A Royal Pingdom blog post stated, "[T]he average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.  The average number of tweets per hour was 1,138,772."

Also, "The highest number of tweets per hour we measured was 1,841,289," and "the lowest number of tweets measured during the period was 566,854 per hour . . ."

Now, as for the specifics.  In one sense, there's no surprise on the time front; people don't tweet as much during traditional sleeping hours.  Otherwise, Pingdom recorded steady activity throughout the day.  Which could signal good things for Twitter, since individuals aren't just playing around with it when they're already stuck in front of a computer.

Interestingly, users don't exactly abandon it on weekends, either (although the number of tweets does decline a little).  And at the rate things are going, the Royal Pingdom blog post noted that it shouldn't be long before Twitter is processing one billion tweets per month.

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Pingdom Documents Twitter’s Worldwide Growth

Another school year's started, and (probably by coincidence) the Royal Pingdom blog has presented what might be considered a long-term report card on Twitter.  The data shows, as a blog post explains, "how Twitter has been taking over the world."

The good people of Pingdom put together a few images based on Google search data, and a map of where Twitter was popular in 2006 displays nothing besides the United States in dark blue.  The rest of the globe hadn't paid any statistically significant attention to the site.

Now the graphic's looking quite different.  Twitter's of interest to searchers in all sorts of places.  The top 10, according to Pingdom and Google, are the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, and Singapore.

Finally, in addition to documenting these facts about the past and present state of things, the blog post issued an interesting prediction: "[I]t's probably just a matter of time before other languages take off on Twitter."

So if you wouldn't have already done so, look for dark blue to appear in even more far-flung corners of the 2010 map.