
Pushed By Celebrities, Twitter Is Poised To Double Its Monthly Traffic Once Again - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/twitter-is-poised-to-double-its-monthly-traffic-once-again/
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andr
The article says outright that the user IDs are not a reliable scheme for
measuring growth, so I'm failing to see the relevance.

<speculation>

It appears that they are doing a partitioned autoincrement for their user IDs.
For example, if you have 10 servers, you give every server a unique seed
between 0 and 9 and have them increment the IDs by 10. So server 1 would
produce IDs 0,10,20, etc. Server 2 would give you 1,11,21, etc. This allows
you to easily use autoincrements in a sharded environment and to find the
shard by looking at the modulo of the ID.

The trick is that you'd usually assign seeds for all servers in the cluster
and at least half of them would usually be read slaves (which can become
masters if needed). So the real number of users is at least 1/2 of the max
user ID. You would also use more partitions than the number of servers you
have right now, so that you don't have to readjust existing servers as your
cluster grows.

This, of course, is pure speculation.

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jasonlbaptiste
I've seen a lot of my "normal/non tech industry" friends get on recently. They
have a completely different usage pattern:

Under 100 followers is more than enough (followers and following)

A whole lot less updates.

Probably half protect their updates.

I think a lot of people will stick around, especially if they can follow
celebrities and the like. The suggested followers that get added to your
account are great for retention.

Good luck bros.

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TomOfTTB
The Twitter hype has really gotten ridiculous since Friday's Oprah. The bottom
line is this: I don't know how big Twitter will eventually get but the initial
rush of people checking it out doesn't prove anything. Statistics show most
people will look once and then leave.

Put another way, Oprah has an average of 8 million viewers yet 3 days after
the broadcast her Twitter follower total is a little under 400k. What's that
tell you?

~~~
simonw
That after just three days nearly one in twenty of her viewers are following
her on Twitter? That's a pretty astonishing number.

~~~
TomOfTTB
By what standard is that astonishing? Or here's another question: If that's
such an astonishing number why did the Techcrunch article feel the need to
exaggerate it?

For God sakes it's a free service. 1 in 20 takers when there is 0 barriers to
entry isn't astonishing. Maybe, MAYBE if 1 in 20 became active users that
would be impressive but I doubt even that will happen.

~~~
simonw
There's a huge barrier to entry. First, you need to be paying attention during
that particular part of the show. Second, you need a computer and an internet
connection. Third, you need to have it nearby when you're watching Oprah -
you're not going to remember to do it otherwise. Then you need to figure out
what to do. Then you need to go through the signup process. Finally, having
signed up you need to find Oprah again (not so easy if you don't understand
URLs very well, like most people who use the internet) and click "follow".

1/20 is astonishing.

~~~
TomOfTTB
By your calculation it's amazing anyone gets anything done. I mean, somehow
Oprah's books sell millions of copies on Amazon. Is amazon easier to use than
Twitter? I don't think so.

Let me ask you this. What proof do you have that any of her followers weren't
the people who were already on Twitter? Shaq has 700k+, Ashton has a million.
Isn't it possible Oprah's 400k came out of those people?

It's possible Twitter didn't gain any users over the weekend (unlikely but
possible)

~~~
simonw
No proof at all. I was just trying to point out that your initial suggestion
that picking up 400,000 followers in three days didn't deserve "hype" was
unfounded.

