TwitDir

TwitDir is a Twitter users directory, launched on May 24, 2007. TwitDir offers the possibility to perform a search on names of public Twitter accounts (both name as screen-name). In addition to this, TwitDir offers Top 20 lists : Top 20 followed, Top 20 updaters, Top 20 favouriters, Top 20 followers.


The TwitDir Top 20 lists look very similar to the Top 100 lists from Twitterholic. My first impression was that TwitDir did not add much compared to Twitterholic. It takes more time to load and it only shows 20 accounts. After a closer look I noticed several differences in the lists generated by both sites. The Top 100 lists from Twitterholic are far from complete. Let's have a look at the TwitDir and Twitterholic lists for number of followers and number of friends.

Followers
4 Twitter accounts from the TwitDir Top 20 followed are not listed in the Twitterholic Top 100 Followers. The number of followers according to TwitDir is always higher compared to the numbers of Twitterholic.

Friends
12 Twitter accounts from the TwitDir Top 20 followers are not listed in the Twitterholic top 100 Friends. The number of friends according to TwitDir is higher compared to the numbers of Twitterholic for 5 of the 8 accounts that appear in both lists.

Even Steven Jobs wondered a month ago why his Twitter account is not appearing on Twitterholic. It looks like that TwitDir is the best source of information for Twitter Top 20 lists.

TwitDir has launched a little game, they want us to guess how many public Twitter accounts there are. This number has to be greater than 120k according to one of the guesses. I created a Twitter account for testing two months ago. I haven't published anything on this account, there are no followers, nor did I add friends. I was really surprised to notice that TwitDir was able to find this account. TwitDir seems to have access to the complete list of Twitter accounts. I am really curious to know the number of Twitter accounts.