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Twitter Growth

I was curious how fast Twitter was growing, so I spent a few minutes just now digging into some data (it’s raining and I’m bored).  Twitter assigns sequential IDs to each post on their site.  By analyzing those ID numbers in relation to the time elapsed between two posts, you can estimate the total number of updates made by all Twitter members.  The chart above shows the total number of post IDs that were assigned each day over the last year or so.  While it’s possible that some IDs are generated for posts that were deleted or by hiccups in their system, I imagine this is a fairly accurate view of their post volume and growth trends. A few interesting highlights:

• Twitter is currently generating almost 4 million post IDs per day on average.
• Post growth increased significantly towards the end of last year and Twitter has been on the hockey stick curve since then.
• The spike you see in early November is election day, which was a huge day for Twitter.
• Twitter is still relatively small compared to status update volume on Facebook. Facebook publically disclosed that at least “15 million users update their statuses at least once each day”.

Interesting data.  Twitter has clearly passed some sort of tipping point, but can they catch up to Facebook?