Twitter.com response time

I just did a couple of tests with host-tracker to get an idea of the response times of the Twitter website.



Test 1
Received responses : 37
Average response time : 1.93 sec

Test 2
Received responses: 34
Average response time: 1.92 sec

Test 3
Received responses: 35
Average response time: 1.09

Test 4
Received responses: 36
Average response time: 1.17

I have the impression that when I launch Twitter.com myself, it takes more time to load.

Unfortunately the uptime statistics for Twitter.com at pingdom have stopped working from August 7, 2007.

Does anyone else know others tools monitoring the availability or response times of Twitter.com ?

Followers, Friends, Fans, Admirers, Connections, Subscribers, Visitors, ...

My Twitter account has several followers, and I am following also several Twitter accounts. I have a lot of friends on Facebook. I have a few fans on Pownce. I have admirers on MyBlogLog. I have connections on Linkedin. Several persons are subscribers to the feeds of my blogs on Bloglines. The OneStat counter records the visitors of this blog.

Luckily, I have still friends for which I do not need fancy tools to meet and to have fun.

Twitstat

Twitstat.com is an initiative of Michiel Berger from The Netherlands. He was looking for a nice tool to follow the Twitosphere. If you have been away for a couple of days, the Twitter interface does not allow you to quickly spot the most interesting topics being discussed within the community of your Twitter followers. He developed Twitstat.com as his own solution.

Twitstat monitors the Twitter messages from the users following the Twitstat account on Twitter. On Twitstat.com the detailed list of Twitter messages from the followers of Twitstat account on Twitter is shown. Twitstat.com also shows an overview by day of the total number of Twitter messages indexed and the top 10 of most active Twitter users for today and yesterday. Launched only on August 22, 2007, Twitstat is live for a couple of weeks. Currently the Twitstat account on Twitter is being followed by 96 other Twitter accounts, mostly from The Netherlands. The previous days around 800 Twitter messages have been indexed daily.


Twitstat also offers the possiblity to obtain statistics for an individual Twitter user. The picture below shows an overview of the Twitter messages from Erwin Blom, one of the most active Twitter users in The Netherlands (see also the Second state of the Dutch Twitosphere).


Another interesting feature of Twitstat is the possiblity to see how often and when a search string was present in the indexed Twitter messages. The picture below shows all Twitter messages containing the word "Twitter".


The graphs shown by Twitstat can be improved. Only the left most and right most columns are labeled with a date. The current graphs only contain columns for dates with Twitter messages, dates without messages are not shown as data points on the graph. The graphs are not a correct display of the time distribution of the indexed Twitter messages. For an example, have a look at the graph for search string "pownce". There were messages on 30-08-2007, 05-09-2007, 09-09-2007 and 11-09-2007. The graphs contains 4 columns, only two of them are labeled.


A very nice thing of Twitstat.com is that everything is also available as an RSS-feed. You can even get an RSS feed to find Twitter messages from a given Twitter user and a given search string. This RSS feed gives all Twitter messages from Marketingfacts containing "tinyurl".

Currently, Twitstat.com isn't even in beta yet. The number of Twitter accounts followed is rather limited. The response times of Twitstat are amazingly fast. Will this be also the case if Twitstat becomes more popular ? I can imagine that keeping Twitstat alive will require some funding (e.g. for the storage of data or the bandwith) in the future. Will Twitstat.com remain ad-free ?

If Twitstat.com becomes too popular there is a risk that its usefulness will decrease. I can imagine a situation in which a Twitter user from The Netherlands is interested in a specific topic discussed within the Dutch Twitter community. If this topic is also discussed in the global Twitophsere (indexed by Twitstat) the search results for the specific topic will probably contain a lot of Twitter messages in which the Twitter user is not interested in. The signal to noice ratio will decrease.

Private Twitter accounts visible on Facebook

Messages from private Twitter accounts should be only read by other Twitter accounts that have been approved by the owner of the private Twitter account. I discovered that messages from private Twitter accounts can be read by other users on Facebook.

Peter Dedecker is one of my friends on Facebook. I am however not a follower of his private Twitter account. With my Twitter account I do not have access to his private Twitter messages.



Peter installed the Twitter application on Facebook, showing his Twitter messages on his Facebook account.



If you have a private Twitter account you have to be careful by installing the Twitter application on Facebook. This application assumes that all your friend on Facebook have also been accepted to follow your private messages on Twitter.

Update September 14, 2007
According to this blogpost new Twitter accounts cannot be accessed anymore thru Facebook. I just checked if I still have access to the private Twitter account used in the original post, which is still the case. It seems that private Twitters accounts that already are linked to Facebook accounts remain visible.

Twitter People Search

This week profile search was added to Twitter, as announced on Twitter and on the Twitter blog.

Earlier this week, Terraminds, a brand new Twitter search engine was announced, also on Twitter and on a blog. Terraminds allows to search in updates and also in users.

The arrival of these two brand new Twitter people search tools is a good opportunity to review three Twitter people search engines.

Twitter search


Launched : August 22, 2007
Author : Twitter Inc.
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio, last message
Results : public and private twitter accounts matching the search argument(s), if your account is accepted as follower the last message will be shown
Grouping : Results in groups of 20
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : partial matching "travel" will also match "traveler", multiple terms accepted "John Mexico" will return all Twitter users where "John" appears in one of the fields and where "Mexico" also appears in one the fields, not necessary the same field containing "John"
Response times : fast
Additional information : Only available if you are logged in
A few test cases :
Miami : 275
Travel : 652
Linkedin : 183

Twitdir


Launched : May 24, 2007
Author : Laurent Pantanacce
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio, last message, number of following, followers, favorites and updates including indication if Twitter accounts appears in top 10, top 100 or top 1000
Results : only public Twitter accounts matching the search argument(s)
Grouping : Results in groups of 5
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : partial matching "travel" will also match "traveler", only full string matching "John Smith" will not give the same results as "Smith John", "John Mexico" will return only the Twitter accounts where this search argument can be found in one of the fields
Response times : rather slow
Additional information : Over 400,000 Twitter users known to Twitdir, Twitdir offers also Top 100 lists for number of followers, followed, updaters, favouriters
A few test cases :
Miami : 262
Travel : 618
Linkedin : 40

Terraminds


Launched : August 20, 2007
Author : Chris Laux
Info shown : account name, photo, name, location, web, bio
Results : only public Twitter accounts matching the search argument(s)
Grouping : Results in groups of 20
Search space : account name, name, web, location and bio
Search arguments : Full matching of search string : "travel" will not return "traveler", multiple terms accepted "John Mexico" will return all Twitter users where "John" appears in one of the fields and where "Mexico" also appears in one the fields, not necessary the same field containing "John"
Response times : very fast
Additional information : in operation only for a few days, number of known Twitter users is probably still rather limited
A few test cases :
Miami : about 32 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week
Travel : about 75 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week
Linkedin : about 1 twitter users who posted in the last 1 week


There are also search tools capable of searching for Twitter messages. See my previous post on this subject. Indirectly these tools allow also to look up Twitter users based on search arguments appearing in their messages.

Is there still a future for Twitter people search tools now that Twitter has launched profile search ? I personally think there is still room for Twitter people search tools offering something more. What is currently lacking is advanced search. None of the search tools accept complex query syntax with operators as "and", "or" and "not". Futhermore, currently all fields are searched. It is not possible to limit a search to a specific field, e.g. only Twitter with miami as location.

Virtual travel agent on Twitter

Marco Derksen, owner of Marketingfacts.nl, the most famous marketing blog in The Netherlands, just spent his holiday in Finland. What has this to do with Twitter ? Quite a lot.

When Marco was thinking of finding a holiday location, he asked advice to his 300+ followers on Twitter. He got several suggestions, including Finland. When he later asked for specific tips for Finland, he received several of them. When he finally made it to Finland, he stayed in touch with his homebase by informing his followers of his wherabouts and his travel experiences in Finland.

Upon his return, he made a blogpost and a presentation (both in Dutch) describing his experiences. He suggests another, innovative use of Twitter, Twitter as a virtual Travel Agent. He already started several new Twitter accounts for people traveling to various holiday locations (Amsterdam, United States, Australia, Canada and Finland). The goal is that someone, e.g.John Smith planning to go to one of these holiday locations, would follow the Twitter account for his destination. The Twitter travel account will also follow John Smith's Twitter account. When John Smith would ask questions in his Twitter feed, these answers will be picked up by the location experts for the Twitter account. Ideally tourists would also exchange travel tips between themselves. If there would be an interface between Twitter and a photo sharing service (e.g. Flickr), tourists and location experts can also exchange pictures. The advantage for John Smith of using Twitter during hist stay at the holiday location, is that he can receive travel tips on his mobile phone.

Marco's suggestion to use Twitter as a virtual travel agent has however also its limitations. This worked fine for Marco, because of his impressive network (on Twitter but also through the Marketingfacts blog and in real life in the Netherlands). What is lacking from his idea is the funding. Why would someone help people he never met before (and probably will never meet) with travel tips for a location ? Who will pay the location experts ? There are plenty of other sites where you can find useful information during the planning phase of a holiday. Twitter is OK for exchange of messages, but it is rather difficult to look up Twitter messages from the past.

Future will tell if Twitter will be used as a virtual travel agent.

Second state of the DutchTwitosphere

On April 22, 2007 I published the first state of the Twitosphere in the Netherlands. With this new state of the Twitosphere I want to give an idea how the Twitosphere in the Netherlands has evolved from then.

Using the same approach as for the first state of the Twitosphere, I managed to find 2090 active Twitter accounts from the Netherlands. A Twitter account was considered to be held by someone from the Netherlands if the location explicitely refers to the Netherlands or if the Twitter user was located in the Netherlands according to one of the Twitter mapping mashups. The actual number of Twitter users in the Netherlands is probably higher as only 50% of the Twitter users specify their location in their profile (see this previous post).

For a population of 16.57 million people (according to Wikipedia), the Netherlands has 2090 Twitter accounts, which means that there is a Twitter account for every 7,928 inhabitants.

History of the Twitter accounts in the Netherlands
This graph below shows the history of the Twitter accounts in the Netherlands. The graph is based on the date of the first message posted on each of the public Twitter accounts. For private Twitter accounts (177) the date of the first message is not accessible. In addition to that, there are still 88 Twitter accounts without a single update, they are still waiting for the first message to be published. The growth of the number of Twitter accounts in the Netherlands accelerated from mid March 2007. This accelerated growth seems to continue until now. On an average day 8 new Twitter accounts are created by someone from the Netherlands.



Degree of activity
The graph below is generated only for the Twitter accounts where I could determine the date of the first message and the date of the last message, meaning that Twitter users without messages and private Twitter accounts were left out.

The graph contains two parts. In the upper part, Twitter users who have published at one Twitter message in the last 14 days are plotted as a line, starting from the date of the first message to the date of the last message. The color of the line depends on the number of messages (also called updates) published. The lower part contains Twitters users without updates in the last 14 dates. These accounts can perhaps be considered as inactive accounts.

The lines in the lower part of the graph are much shorter and show almost no colors.


Types of Twitters users in the Netherlands
A while ago I published a blogpost describing 4 types of Twitter users : Lurkers, Bots, High Influentials and Twitter stars.

On the graph below all 2090 Twitter users in the Netherlands are plotted according to their number of updates and the number of followers. There are currently no High Influential Twitter users (high number of followers but low number of updates). There are several Bots - Twitter accounts where the messages are automatically generated (low number of followers and very high number of updates). Luckily there are several Twitter Stars in the Netherlands, e.g. twitter.com/Dutchcowboy, twitter.com/erwblo, twitter.com/frankmeeuwsen, twitter.com/gervis, twitter.com/marketingfacts en twitter.com/tonie.



Top lists
To conclude this state of the Twitosphere, several top lists of Twitter accounts according to different criteria.

Oldest Twitter accounts from the Netherlands
http://twitter.com/cvodb - Caroline - first message on 14/07/2006
http://twitter.com/ianus - !ianus keller - first message on 15/07/2006
http://twitter.com/martijn - Martijn - first message on 15/07/2006
http://twitter.com/SLAM - Stéphan - first message on 21/07/2006
http://twitter.com/stronk - stronk - first message on 24/07/2006

Top 5 Following
http://twitter.com/fortune_cookie - fortune_cookie - 1128 following
http://twitter.com/twitterNL - NL - 1150 following
http://twitter.com/KennySB - Christian Weij - 996 following
http://twitter.com/todaysart - TodaysArt Festival! - 933 following
http://twitter.com/3VOOR12 - 3VOOR12 - 564 following

Top 5 Followers
http://twitter.com/3VOOR12 - 3VOOR12 - 551 followers
http://twitter.com/twitterNL - NL - 482 followers
http://twitter.com/marketingfacts - Marco Derksen - 450 followers
http://twitter.com/erwblo - erwin blom - 433 followers
http://twitter.com/FrRoderick - Roderick Vonhogen - 381 followers

Top 5 Updates - manually generated Twitter messages
http://twitter.com/erwblo - erwin blom - 7355 updates
http://twitter.com/marketingfacts - Marco Derksen - 6823 updates
http://twitter.com/gerben - Gerben Bouwhuis - 6060 updates
http://twitter.com/vangeest - Yuri van Geest - 5206 updates
http://twitter.com/Slijterijmeisje - Petra - 4719 updates

Top 5 Updates - automatically generated twitter messages
http://twitter.com/ShopAHolic - Shopaholic - 84089 updates
http://twitter.com/detelegraaf - De Telegraaf - 7046 updates
http://twitter.com/spitsnet - Sp!ts - 5851 updates
http://twitter.com/volkskrant - De Volkskrant - 5578 updates
http://twitter.com/MegaJobs - MegaJobs.nl - 3402 updates