According to Pingdom, Twitter handled 1.76 billion tweets in April, which reflects a 46.7 percent rise from 1.2 billion tweets in January. “Twitter is growing like crazy,” according to the company, and if it keeps things up, Twitter better hope its servers are ready.
Pingdom attempted to extrapolate how many tweets are in store for the future by looking back on how much Twitter has grown month-by-month:
- Nov. 2009: 16.8 percent
- Dec. 2009: 16.6 percent
- Jan. 2010: 16.9 percent
- Feb. 2010: 15.6 percent
- March 2010: 16.3 percent
- April 2010: 15.4 percent
During the past six months, the average per-month increase in tweets was 16.3 percent, according to Pingdom, “and no month has deviated much from this value.” Still, the company insists on knocking down the rate to a more conservative, flat rate of 16 percent per month.
If Twitter is able to maintain this steady growth rate through the end of the year, the number of tweets per month would surge 494 percent in 12 months, which would actually reflect slowed growth from 2009.
All said and done, given the above assumptions, Twitter should process 6.7 billion tweets in January 2011, up from 1.2 billion tweets in January 2010, according to Pingdom.
The company also notes that Twitter should pass 2 billion tweets this month, and that by January 2011, activity on Twitter will be increasing nearly 1 billion tweets per month.
While Pingdom expressed no firm stance on whether or not Twitter could maintain this crazy growth and achieve this possible scenario, “Twitter has some scaling to think about.”
According to Nielsen, Twitter saw its unique audience in the U.S. grow 45 percent from 12.9 million in March 2009 to 20.1 million in March 2010.
Meanwhile, Facebook saw its audience grow 69 percent from 69.2 million in March 2009 to 117.1 million in March 2010.
Globally, 313.7 million unique users flocked to social networking sites in March, up 19.8 percent from 261.7 million in the previous year. All in all, 113.1 billion minutes were spent on these sites in March, with each person spending an average of 6:00:25 (hh:mm:ss) on them during the month.
Sources:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/05/07/how-much-we-will-be-tweeting-by-january-2011-chart/
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/facebook-and-twitter-post-large-year-over-year-gains-in-unique-users/
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