Twitter Growth: 125% Increase In Last 2 Months
In February, I wrote a short post about Twitter’s impressive growth rate. Since then, Twitter has received a tremendous amount of coverage in the press and through word-of-mouth, so I decided to update the data. Above is a chart that shows the number of Twitter post ID’s generated per day since early 2008. You’ll see that their growth rate has only increased since February and is showing no signs of slowing down. Post frequency increased an impressive 125% in just the last two months, from about 3 million posts / day in early February to roughly 7 million today. Below are some more details on the methodology I used to generate this graph since a few people asked last time…
Twitter assigns sequential ID numbers and a timestamp to each status update, so it’s possible to calculate the total number of posts that were generated across all of Twitter by comparing two update ID’s and the time elapsed between those two updates. For example, if the most recent post ID was 100 million and a post ID from 24 hours ago was 99 million, that suggests that a total of 1 million posts were generated over the last day. I post something to Twitter nearly every day, so I pulled a list of all my updates, then used that data to calculate overall growth. It’s possible that the Twitter system generates some false ID’s, but I imagine this chart is a good reflection of how frequently people post to the service.
