How many people use Twitter?
After a several month lapse, I’ve been sucked back into the Twitter vortex. When set up in the right way – which will differ for everyone – Twitter is a great way to get a constant stream of news, links, tid bits of randomness, and nastily entertaining little squabbles across the strange interwebs. I’ve found a nice balance of people I follow among those I know, those I admire or enjoy keeping up with in the online world, and a certain cross-section of random folk that I’ve stumbled across.
I’m reminded of a story I picked up from Mathew Ingram called “If the news is important, it will find me”. In essence, I think Twitter is a great filter for allowing news to come to you without taking a lot of energy to go out and find it yourself. It’s all about tweaking and adjusting the filters to just the right frequencies.
My renewed interest in Twitter led me to think about how many people are using it these days. I then stumbled across a post on Twitter Facts that talks about a slowdown in Twitter’s growth from 3,500 new users a day to just 750 a day nowadays. Twitdir is used as the source, and if you believe Twitdir, the number of current users hovers around one million.
This doesn’t feel right to me because of the pretty wide exposure, buzz, and popularity of Twitter in the blogosphere, and for a few other reasons as well. Robert Scoble, one of Twitter’s most prolific users and most popular profiles to follow, has about 17,000 followers. If there were one million Twitter users, that would mean that Scoble is followed by about 1.7% of that group. That’s actually a pretty enormous figure, even for the Scobleizer! According to Twitterholic, Barack Obama, Jason Calacanis, and Leo Laporte are in the same range, with between 15,000 to 20,000 followers.
And speaking of Twitterholic, a commenter on Twitter Facts points out that Twitterholic claims that there are at least 11 million Twitter users, citing this page as an example.
And just this morning, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger says that “Twitter has grown exponentially in it’s use by tens of millions of people around the world.”
Turning over to Alexa, we see that Twitter is currently ranked 580, with yesterday’s number rolling in at 428. The trend line is very healthy, and overall it’s very clear that Twitter’s traffic numbers are pretty enormous.
So what gives? How many people are using Twitter?
