Twitter id's and number of Twitter users

A comment on the previous post (1 million Twitter users) stated that "there are already a lot more than 12 million accounts on Twitter". The proof of this statement is given by information grabbed from the Twitterholic site.



Each Twitter account has its own Twitter id. You can easily find your own Twitter id by looking at the URL for the RSS feed for your Twitter account. In the early days of Twitter, Twitter id's were sequentially attributed. This made it easy to track the number of total Twitter accounts created (not necessary the number of active Twitter accounts). Jason Kottke published almost a year ago an article based on such stats.



Because of the growing popularity of Twitter, the Twitter developers decided to change the policy of generating Twitter id's by the end of November 2006. From that moment on there were gaps between the id's actually used. Assuming that the Twitter id of a new created Twitter account is equal the total number of Twitter accounts does not seem correct to me. The exact number of Twitter accounts created until now (and the number of active Twitter accounts) is only known by the people at Twitter Inc. And they haven't disclosed it until now ...

By the way, currently it is not possible to register Twitter names containing spaces. In the early days it was possible to register such Twitter names. Some of these names are still in use, e.g. twitter.com/there you go.

1 million Twitter users

On January 6, 2008, I predicted that Twitter would reach 1 million public uers before April 1, 2008. Twitdir reports the number of public Twitter users it has detected. Around mid February it seemed that the Twitter user base was growing faster than I expected. In the beginning of March however the growth slowed down. This reduced growth has continued until now, see the graph below.

If this reduced growth continues at the same speed, the 1 million mark of public Twitter users according to Twitdir will be reached only around June 2008. There is no explanation why the growth of the Twitter user base suddenly changed from 3,500 new users per day to 750 new users per day.

As mentioned in one of the previous posts on this blog, the number of private Twitter users could be around 15%. This implies that the total number of Twitter accounts at this very moment already exceeds 1 million.

ilist

ilist is another nice (and brand new) application letting you manage your to do list with Twitter.



There is no need to signup. By sending Twitter messages to @ilist, you build up your to do list. Your list can be viewed (and managed) at ilist.

Twitter Visualizations

The FlowingData blog has a very nice overview of 17 ways to visualize the Twitter Universe. One of these 17 ways is a graph I created almost a year ago mapping all friend relationships of the Belgian Twitter users.

The hype of the Twittering Plants

From February 24, 2007 several newssites and blogs reported about how Botanicalls made it possible for plants to Twitter. Probably Makezine was one of first sites reporting this news.

Botanicalls is a project concerning communications between plants and people. Each plant on the Botanicalls system is equipped with sensors. The hardware connected to the sensors is able to determine when a human intervention is needed. This human intervention can be requested by a phone call automatically generated by the hardware and software. Now the sensors can be connected to a computer generating Twitter messages. Hopefully these Twitter messages are read by someone who can come to apply the requested action, probably adding water.

On the Botanicalls site detailed instructions can be found on how to set up the system. You need a plant, a little bit of hardware (e.g. transistors, resistors, led, wires, nails), an Arduino board, a computer, a little bit of software, (the Arduino environment and the Botanicalls Twitter Code) and finally a Twitter account.

There has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere and in the twitosphere.

Despite all this buzz, I only found 3 Twitter accounts presumably from a twittering plant.
twitter.com/pothos
twitter.com/pothos_etech08
twitter.com/faludi

The people at Botanicalls are interested in the experiences of others setting up Twitter accounts for plants that need water. They ask that experimenters would upload photos of their setup on Flickr with the tag: Botanicalls_Twitter. Currently there is only one such photo on Flickr.

Conclusion. A lot of people have picked up the news. Some have ordered the hardware. Only very few people actually connected the hardware yet to their plants. In the meantime Twitter users had an interesting topic to discuss in the twitosphere.

PS I am wondering why the people at Botanicalls did not consider to link to sensors to an automated watering device.

Growth of number of Twitter users according to Twitdir

A while ago I predicted that Twitter would have 1 million users before April 1, 2008. The source for the number of (public) Twitter users is Twitdir. Twitdir reports on its homepage the total number of Twitter users detected.

I observed a spectacular slowdown in the growth of the Twitter users reported by Twitdir. See the graph below.



Is the growth really slowing down ? Or is Twitdir not able to catch up ?