How many people use Twitter?

Posted on September 30, 2008 by dayn

UPDATE (9/30/10):
Luke W provided recent Twitter usage stats this week complete with source links. Thanks, Luke.

UPDATE (4/15/10): The Huffington Post just posted actual Twitter user stats & figures from Chirp, the Twitter developer’s conference.

Here are the highlights:

Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)
Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet.
Over half of all tweets (60 percent) come from third party applications.
Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.

— END UPDATE

The actual figure for Twitter user stats is hard to get, unless you’re a Twitter employee. Here’s a list of links that are helpful in estimating just how many Tweeters are out there.

http://www.twitdir.com displays a running total of the number of public Twitter users in it’s directory.

http://tweetrush.com analyzes number of tweets sent over the last 7 days.

http://www.twitterholic.com lists the most popular Twitter users by followers.

http://www.compete.com shows the approx number of unique visitors to the twitter.com site.

Finally, see Michael Arrington’s post about this topic on TechCrunch from April 2008.

Update:

For a look at the volume of tweets per hour and per day, check GigaTweet. Lovely graphs.

See also Quantcast’s analysis of twitter.com. These stats are only for the twitter.com web site, and do not include desktop or mobile Twitter client users.

Twitter has 105m registered users, 600m searches per day.. and more numbers from Chirp (guardian.co.uk)
Twitter: All the Numbers That Matter (gigaom.com)
Just the Facts: Statistics from Twitter Chirp (readwriteweb.com)

Add or remove formatting buttons from the WordPress write post textarea

Posted on September 26, 2008 by dayn

show more text formatting buttons in wordpress

As I write this, I’m looking at at single row of buttons at the top of this WordPress ‘Write Post’ text area that allows me some basic text formatting options; bold, italic, strikethrough, bulleted list, numbered list, and so on. A few of my clients have asked for more formatting options like the ability to change the font size and color. Most of the options they’re after are actually just hiding.
If you’re seeing a single row of formatting buttons, try the last one on the right. It shows the ‘Kitchen Sink’ which is a second row of formatting options like style, underline, justify, text color, etc, and is sure to satisfy the perfectionist blogger.

$mce_buttons = apply_filters('mce_buttons', array('bold', 'italic', 'strikethrough', 'separator',

Now, feel free to remove or add any of the attributes listed on lancelhoff.com (thanks Lance!) until you’ve made formatting stew.

A new right click for MacBook users.

Posted on September 17, 2008 by dayn

Turn on 2 fingers and click for right click on a mac laptop.

If you haven’t noticed that your Apple laptop doesnt have a right click trackpad button, I envy you. For those that have, you may have figured out that you can hold ctrl and click to bring up the right click menu.

Here’s a new, easier way from Lifehacker’s Top Ten Right Click Tools that I’ll be adopting immediately. In System Preferences, (click the Apple logo in the upper left) choose Keyboard & Mouse. Check the “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click” checkbox.

Now, to fire trigger the right click, put two fingers on the trackpad, and click!

Create a photo icon on iPhone that dials your friend

Posted on September 12, 2008 by dayn

Dobson's tool makes a photo icon on your iPhone to dial a contact

Dobsons tool makes a photo icon for iPhone that dials

Jordan Dobson, one of the superstars over at Squad made a neat “iPhone Photo Dialer Icon Creator“. Visiting this site on your iPhone lets you create an icon on the iPhone with a custom image (from the web).

http://madebysquad.com/iphone-photo-dial/

Clicking the icon dials any phone number. It does launch Safari and ask you if you want to call the number, but still nice work, Dobson.

A list of 5 ways that Comcast sucks, today

Posted on September 11, 2008 by dayn

Comcast can suck 5 times a day

Comcast has called every day for the past week and left a message for me to call them back. Calling the number they left places me at the general Comcast phone system menu. What number do I press for, “I dunno douchebags, you called me?”.
I have an account tied to one email address for comcast.com, and and a different email address and account for comcast.net. Apparently, the two sides dont share info.
In the menu tree, to reach the next menu, I have to wait though an advertisement… for a pay per view program I can’t even watch with my package.
I made it through the Comcast phone number, entering my phone number, then my 16 digit account number (which I had to look up online, because I dont have it memorized), and got through to Anton. After a greeting from Anton, I asked why they called me. Anton hung up.
Finally, I was able to talk to a sales rep who was unable to suss out why they called me, but was plenty eager to offer, “Hey, while I have you, I see you’re not using Comcast for phone service…”

Stopping MSN Messenger SPAM in Adium

Posted on September 10, 2008 by dayn

I use Adium as my IM chat client because it allows me to chat across networks (AIM MobileMe, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, Jabber, ICQ, and so many more) from one app.

Somehow, my MSN Messenger contact info must have gotten out, because I began to get hit every 5 to 10 minutes on MSN with a SPAM instant message. It varied slightly, but was usually something like “I can’t get (something) to work. Check out my pictures at (url)”, or “I saw you on (blah), login to (url) so we can chat.”

Thankfully, blocking this unwanted IM SPAM is easy in Adium. From the menu bar, choose Adium>Privacy Settings… Choose the offending Account, in my case, my MSN account. Then, for Privacy Level, choose Allow only contacts on my contact list. Close the window. Presto, no more instant message SPAM from that account.

Dayn W Creative

I am a web presence strategist, UX designer, proponent of social media. These are my notes.

Monthly Archives: September 2008