Michael Boyle’s weblog

The nice folks at Twitter have started to publish a bit more information than has been available about their usage. Today Biz wrote a post on the Twitter blog about Twitter Web Traffic Around the World which is very interesting.

A couple of interesting things pop out at first glance. First of all, 60% of (web) traffic is non-US in origin. This might seem like a high number, but when we compare that figure to published stats from sites like Facebook, Twitter has a relatively lower number of international users. Secondly, and most interestingly to me, if you eyeball the percentages in terms of the population of each of the “international” countries represented in the top 10, I imagine that Canada would jump right to the top of the list.

Considering that this is just an assessment of web traffic, not overall traffic, I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from that relative to mobile usage in Canada (usually said to be very low relative to European countries and others), but unless Twitter’s mobile roots are in fact insignificant compared to web usage, the numbers do suggest that things aren’t quite as bad in Canada as most of the other stats portray.

In the past couple of weeks there has been an increasingly organized movement to draft renowned copyfighter Lawrence Lessig to run for Congress in the California 12th district. Lessig himself is considering it and says, “that decision will be made soon.” One of the more interesting aspects of his possible run is that Lessig recently committed to switching gears to deal with governance and corruption issues instead of focusing on copyright and related issues. It goes without saying that I and thousands like me would love the idea of a guy like Lessig in Congress. There are many fine Congresspeople, but still relatively few that have a real handle on some of the most important issues of the day.

In his blog Fimoculous, Rex Sorgatz takes a look back at Wired 1.1, which came out 15 years ago this month.

I caught up with Wired at # 1.2, the Crypto Rebels issue, which I bought at a newsstand on Rideau Street in Ottawa. I was already familiar with both Mondo 2000 and the original bOING bOING zine, but that’s not to say that seeing the same kind of material in a clearly more mainstream magazine wasn’t pretty cool.

I wouldn’t say that Wired changed my life - as far back as 1.2 people who were involved in the culture Wired covered were (often rightly) critical of the magazine. But within a year I was in the world that Wired was all about - I had moved to Montreal and was working at CTHEORY, immersed in some of the earliest online publishing and (elsewhere) web community activity.

It’s kind of hard to believe it has been 15 years.

I’ve seen a lot of mashups in the past couple of years, but the Google Maps, Twitter, and Twittervision thing is one of the greatest I’ve seen. Not only does it seem to work very well - but the mix of live results and individual reactions is simply wonderful. And the presentation of the results (on the left of the screen) is a model of simple, clean, effective design. Not super-pretty, but more effective than all the bells and whistles generally seen at the Networks’ sites.

The big news this morning is that Microsoft has offered $44.6B to buy Yahoo, the figure representing a 62% premium on the share price at yesterday’s market close. It’s very unclear at this point what will come of this, but as a user I find it hard to see how such a tie-up could be beneficial to me. From my perspective, although MS has done some interesting things on the net, none of their initiatives have been focused on delivering the best quality of user experience or even innovation - their plays have seemed to by cynically based on scaling up so-so experiences and hoping that the brute force of that scale can make them important. What we learn from Google, however, is that though scale is important, it is deeply related to quality and innovation in a way that consumer software never was.

Update: Techcrunch has looked at some of the numbers.

Late last week Shel Israel wrote an An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys. He’s right on, and his post stands in stark contrast to the chatter a couple of weeks ago that Twitter proves that the only important thing is to aggregate users - leaving aside a biz plan for later.

No one seems to care about mobile Twitter (which seems insane to me), but my 250/week limit was reached in the early evening today - Tuesday. The limit is simply a cost-cutting measure by a company bleeding money on every tweet. The problem for Twitter is that I can easily defect - everyone I get messages from (more or less) is on Facebook, and I can subscribe to their status updates on my mobile - half the time they come from Twitter anyhow.

Part of the problem may be that US companies are backed by US VC - and so they focus primarily on US adoption and usage. The social networking world in general makes that a very dangerous position to take - social network adoption rates are generally lower in the US than most other “rich” countries. A company that is primarily concerned with US results for a US exit will throw the rest of us under the bus pretty quickly.