On a daily basis, millions of people flock to the social networking site Twitter to send out their tweets. Some of the 140 character text messages are pretty mundane and consist of everyday sorts of activities like what you’re listening to on the radio or what you just ate for breakfast.
However, Twitter is also a force and can be the first for breaking news and real time information. Just think about any recent major event (Haiti earthquake, unrest in Iran, death of Michael Jackson etc) and Twitter was one of the first to offer instant information.
According to the marketing research company comScore, January 2010 saw some 75 million unique visitors from across the globe visit Twitter and as a communication tool, Twitter receives 50 million tweets each and every day. Even if you take out the mundane tweets, there is a wealth of digital information on the social site and several upstart Twitter search engines as well as the big search engines are trying to assist Internet users mine through this data and extract the pertinent information they are looking for.
Although the comScore information is revealing in itself, it would have been nice to have had the statistical data broken down even further. One such tidbit of information that would be revealing is what is the average number of tweets per user per day?
Via: Tech Crunch
Uh, well two tweets of those a day are mine *proud*…
Mind you, you’re quite right about breaking news – using Google and “latest” (under ‘Options’, for those not familiar with the extra search facilities), the news invariably comes up on Twitter first.