Twitter may be having trouble finding new users in the U.S., but its existing users in the U.S. seem to be putting out a majority of the Tweets, which are now averaging 27.3 million a day. According to data provided to us by Pingdom, the pattern of Tweets follows waking hours in the U.S. (see chart), even though comScore data suggests more than half of Twitter’s users are from outside the U.S.
While this data is only a snapshot of the Twitter activity in the three weeks between October 21 and November 11, it does show that the number of messages sent out over the service is approaching a massive scale. Pingdom estimates that the average number of Tweets per hour is 1.1 million, with fluctuations between 567,000 and 1.8 million Tweets per hour over the period Pingdom sampled Twitter’s public timeline. At the current rate, people are sending out 10 billion Tweets a year. It was only last month that the 5 billionth Tweet was sent out.
To put that into perspective, Yahoo recently reported about the same number of status update messages going through Yahoo Mail and Messenger, which has at least five times as many users. Tweets still don’t match email however. Yahoo members alone sends out 100 billion emails a month.
It still seems far-fetched now, but one day people may send out more Tweets than emails, a topic we will explore next week at our Realtime CrunchUp. How many of you already do?
I am not a Twitter whore but i still post more than a dozen of them of each day.
10+ t/d makes you a twitter whore
Excited to be going to Real-time and sponsoring!
Adam Boalt
GOSO.com
Well the current tweet rate per second as estimated on on our site: http://www.twitpocalypse.com is: 453 tweets / second.
This makes for 1,630,800 tweets per hour which is pretty close to the number Pingdom is giving out.
Martin
1.6 Million vs 27 Millions pretty close huh ?
alright sorry got it wrong it’s a day.
That’s a lot of tweets but I don’t think it will ever overtake email.
On an average day I tweet more than e-mail. I tweet over a dozen times a day, and probably write half a dozen e-mails.
I’m not sure that Twitter will ever overtake e-mail on a large scale, though. I think something like the Wave Protocol holds more potential to overtake e-mail than tweets do.
Whats the stats for facebook? am sure thats double boring twitter
OK, so approaching 1 billion tweets per month.
Facebook, with 320m active users, with say an average on 2 feed stories per day… that’s almost 20 billion per month – i.e. a much bigger deal, and that doesn’t even include personal notifications, brand/fan page update messages and user-to-user/group-to-user messages.
What about something like 80% of emails are SPAM.
As are most tweets, pretty much.
http://www.tweespeed.com gives you the instant twitter speed.
It also gives you some graphs showing the trends daily or weekly.
You can play with the URL arguments to increase the analyzed period.
Charts are not really beautiful, but they are instructiv.
It’s ridiculous to say that “Tweets” will ever surpass emails in quantity… at least say something with a remote possibility like short status updates will surpass emails.
This Looks very Interesting, but I don’t think it’ll ever surpass Emails
Exactly, don’t just look at twitter traffic people. Look at all other companies built on twitter and what their traffic is also