For those of you who are wondering how many people are using Twitter, or even how many new accounts are created per week, I kind of did a hack using Tweetie2 for the iPhone. I’m sure there are other ways you can get this information – this is just how I did it. I also reference some other articles and research about this towards the bottom of the post 🙂
You may have already noticed that in Tweetie2 when you click on a user to see their profile there is a number under their handle. So I did this for a few people and was shocked to see my friend @alanweinkrantz was #10,326, whereas @pearanalytics was #16,657,710. Clearly Alan must have been an early adopter, so I asked him when he signed up for Twitter and he told me October 2006, which I “think” is right before Twitter even launched themselves at SXSW in March 2007. Alan even joined before @scobleizer who is #13,348.
Is Twitter Growing at 1 million New Accounts Per Week?
Last week on December 18th I created a new account, @welovehosting. That account was #97,717,227. So I thought if I created a new account and got that number, I could compare the two and see what the growth rate was. So today I created @iamryankelly and am #98,669,223, which is a difference of 951,996 new accounts in 5 days. That’s a growth rate of 190,400 new accounts per day.
Note on Accuracy
It’s difficult to determine the accuracy of this method, since according to Twitter Facts, Twitter stopped using sequential ID’s by the end of November 2006. Then there is this blog post by Jason Kottke in May 2007 which discusses the growth of Twitter, complete with various graphs and other deliciousness. So how accurate is this? What do you use to find out Twitter growth?
