Michael Boyle's weblog
OK so this is super cool: Mobile Devices + Twitter Use. This link is zoomed in to focus on Montreal but you can zoom around and view anywhere around the globe (pretty much).
More info from the site:
More than 280 million Tweets posted from mobile phones reveal geographic usage patterns in unprecedented detail.
The nice folks at Common Craft have posted a video that explains Twitter in Plain English – and does so very very well. (Appropriately enough, I found this via Julien‘s tweet a few minutes ago).
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.
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.
Confessions of a Twitter Convert.
I’m eating a hearty meal of crow (roasted, with garlic and rosemary) today, since I’m here to tell you how interesting and downright useful I’ve found Twitter to be since being turned onto it properly at the C4 conference in August. My initial reaction to Twitter was that it was utterly inane…
I think a lot of people were misled by the early talk of Twitter that was focused on whether or not it was useful. That was likely the wrong question, the wrong focus. In fact it is (sometimes) useful, but more importantly, it’s (almost always) fun.
