

Twitter Usage Numbers Finally Emerge - PStamatiou
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/29/end-of-speculation-the-real-twitter-usage-numbers/

======
ilamont
200,000 "active users" equals the population of Shreveport, Louisiana.

~~~
altay
are there any web analytics packages that do these sorts of comparisons?

my band played for a crowd of 3500 once -- that felt like a huge mass of
people, but it's peanuts in web terms. it'd be fun to see random comparisons
to meatspace in your site analytics. e.g., "this week, your site's active
users could've sold out madison square garden 8 times" or "your monthly
uniques exceed the population of maine."

------
Prrometheus
Twitter has $5 million in funding? That seems excessive.

------
softbuilder
So it's the end of the speculation, but not the end of the speculation because
the data -> useless?

~~~
wanorris
Why is it useless?

~~~
softbuilder
_Approaching_ useless.

And here's some quotes from the article:

"None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on
Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients"

"Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there
are many more registered users"

Also, note the commenters saying that the count is higher/lower than expected.
Plus some not sure what to expect. I'm not hating on Twitter or the OP, just
find the data rather meaningless.

~~~
wanorris
I stand corrected.

Site traffic is definitely a weak metric, and total users indeed probably
isn't that interesting.

I find the 200K active users/week and 3M messages quite interesting. I admit,
it would be more enlightening to know the distribution -- or at least
something like the median number of messages per active user -- but that's a
pretty good sense of the reach of Twitter.

~~~
softbuilder
I hear what you're saying. Seeing some numbers does at least indicate people
are using it. So if that was in doubt before, I guess it isn't now. But did
anyone really doubt it?

