Twitter Trends

I just had a look at the information Google Trends presents for search argument "Twitter".



There is a sharp increase for search volume around March/April 2007, followed by a stabilization from June 2007. For news items there is also a sharp increase around March/April 2007. The volume of news shows however a declining trend.

Google Trends also presents interesting additional information.


Region : Japan and Taiwan on top, USA only in fourth place
Cities : top 4 locations in Japan, followed by Taipei, Taiwan, first US location is San Francisco
Languages : Japanese is by far the most frequently used language.

Does this indicate that Twitter is a big hit in Japan and Taiwan, and less successful in the USA ?

Compared to two rivals - Pownce and Jaiku (recently bought by Google) - Twitter is getting a higher search volume. Furthermore Google Trends does not report news items for Jaiku and Pownce. These observations from Google Trends indicate that Twitter could be far more popular than Pownce and Jaiku.

Sitevolume

With Sitevolume you can get an idea of the popularity of your search terms in 5 different popular Web 2.0 sites : Digg, Myspace, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter.

I tried Sitevolume with three search terms : Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku. I tried these terms on 4 of the 5 available sites. It does not make sense to look how often search term "Twitter" is found within Twitter itself and compare this to the number of hits for two of its competitors.

Have a look yourself at the printscreens below. In all cases, Twitter obtained more search results than its two competitors.

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on Digg

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on MySpace

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on YouTube

Search for Twitter, Sitevolume, Pownce, Jaiku on Flickr