As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how weve grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per daythats an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)
Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then theres search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. Well make time to share more information so please stay tuned.
Even before Twitter was officially a company, we opened our technology in ways that invited developers to extend the service. Before long, Twitter became a platform and an ecosystem of innovation began to grow. Recently we’ve announced partnerships with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. These Web leaders gained access beyond our free offerings we licensed them the full feed of all public tweets. This Fire hose of data is made possible by our Streaming API developed at Twitter by John Kalucki and team. There is a lot of useful information in this stream of data.
Full investment in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, were pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible.
Today, were happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-man operations so we came up with a fair way to license access Read more
Over the past few days, Twitter has been helping folks victimized by a phishing attack. Phishing is a deceitful process by which an attempt is made to acquire sensitive information such as Twitter usernames and passwords. The bad guys masquerade as someone you trust and may send you a Direct Message (DM) with a link. This DM may say something along the lines of, LOL that you?? followed by a link to a fake Twitter login page. If you enter your credentials on that fraudulent page, the phishers can sign in as you and trick more people.
Anatomy of A Phishing Scam
Generally a phishing attack against Twitter users breaks down to a three-part process. First, accounts compromised in the manner described above send out messages to all accounts following them. Second, accounts that are newly compromised send out more messages. Third, the scammers behind the phishing attack make an attempt at monetization by sending out spam links instead of links to a fake login page. We fight phishing scams by detecting affected accounts and resetting passwords. However, its better to stop them before they start.
Avoiding Phishing Scams
We designed the Direct Message system so that you could only get DMs from accounts that you choose to follow this cuts way down on spam and attacks. Our Trust and Safety team identifies and deletes spam accounts every day. Still, we recommend against indiscriminately following hundreds or thousands of accounts without having a look first. To learn how you can avoid falling victim to a phishing scam or if you have other questions about keeping your Twitter account secure, please read Keeping Your Account Secure at our help site.
For regular status updates on related issues. please follow @safety and @spam. There is also a Twi Read more
My name is @kevinweil and I’m on the analytics team at Twitter. The convergence of sports, brands, and culture around the Super Bowl makes for a particularly fascinating set of tweets to follow. Fans of the @NFL watch the Super Bowl for the football and others enjoy the spectacle for the commercials. We were curious to understand how these groups interacted with Twitter as the game unfolded.
Hi, I’m Josh and I work in the product team at Twitter. One of the areas I’m working on is helping new users get started so they know how to find and discover what interests them. Today we’re making the first of many changes here to help people ease into the twitterverse by finding and following accounts that interest them.
Two of the biggest challenges for new users have been finding accounts to follow More »