My how things have twanged in just 4 months
June 24th, 2009
TwitterCounter.com is a interesting site that follows twitter statistics and creates a list of the twitter users, ordered by the number of followers they have. On February 22, 2009, I happened to take a few screen captures of TwitterCounter.com and save them to my Evernote (a fantastic application that I highly recommend and will have to blog about soon).
Things have certainly changed in the twitter world (twitterverse?) in a mere 4 months.
On February 22, @ESPN was the 100 most followed twitter account with 37,067 followers. @ESPN currently has 123,070 followers, almost 3.5 times as many as before, but is now the 274th most followed. To make it into the top 100 now, it takes 595,534 followers, a 1,700% increase from just 4 months ago.
Number 200 belonged to @williamshatner on February 22 with 18,605 followers. Captain Kirk is currently in 343rd place with 82,798 followers. To reach number 200 today takes 263,310 followers.
The interactive, film, and music festivals @sxsw was number 300 on February 22 with 13,959 followers. With 37,446 followers, @sxsw has fallen to 712th place. It now takes 96,366 followers to reach the top 300.
On a personal note, on February 22 my account @edskimin was ranked 316th with 13,573 followers. In the past 4 months, I have picked up over 10,000 followers for a total of 24,246, but my ranking has fallen to 1,235.
While there is plenty of talk on the Internet of Twitter’s growth slowing (also here, here and here), it is hard to argue with the phenomenal growth of the past 4 months. Now, how will twitter monetize this popularity?
Let me end by apologizing for the title. I got caught up in the mad rush to add “tw” to everything that relates to twitter.
