Techcrunch acquires FuckedCompany
— hedging bets by covering both the rise and fall of startups; if it’s an April 1 joke, it really shouldn’t be #Justin.tv hits the front page of the SF Chronicle
— watching the cam right now is very meta, as he walks around SF with people recognizing him #All (known) Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter
— like the MegaPenny Project for celestial bodies #This American Life's first TV episode in its entirety
— yay! plus, the newly redesigned TAL website via Kottke #Playing from the Other Side: the Discomfort of Militainment Avatars
— great stuff, including an Iraq vet who refuses to play for the insurgents and an insane FPS published by Hezbollah #The 'I Heart Huckabees' Outtakes
— David O. Russell and Lily Tomlin go completely unhinged; NSFW language #Understanding Avatars in Games and Social Media
— great reading with many visual examples; Gordon’s been on a tear post-SXSW #Letterhead Fonts embrace DRM with disastrous results
— the foundry that made the Upcoming.org logotype goes to the dark side #Video: Chris Ware animation for Showtime's This American Life
— wonderful story about how make-believe cameras changed an elementary school playground via Boing Boing #A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids' Table
— “Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.” via jwz #Handy list of TLD meanings, prices, and registrars
— correction: Thailand charges 2505 Baht for .th domains, not USD via Delicious #Khoi Vinh's "Grids are Good" presentation and slides
— however you feel about his design, this is a must-read #Delutube, the Deleted YouTube Video Viewer
— deleted videos apparently remain on YouTube servers, for the moment via Fimoculous #How Zug Hacked the Super Bowl
— John Hargrave and Rob Cockerham are my idols; unfortunately, unreadable via Jake Ortman #Tracking Twitter's Message Growth
By now, everyone knows that Twitter exploded at SXSW and everybody’s seen the Alexa charts. But this is mostly a mobile app, so pageview traffic is only part of the story. How fast is Twitter really growing?
I decided to find out by using Twitter’s founder Evan Williams himself, albeit indirectly. Since Ev’s Twitter history goes from message #28 in March 2006 to #8,281,991 about three hours ago, it’s a convenient snapshot of Twitter’s growth since it began. Update: The data from November 2006 to present is faulty, since they apparently switched to non-sequential IDs. More information below.
I threw it all in Excel and charted the sequential IDs and dates for each of Ev’s 1,226 messages. The moment SXSW started, Twitter’s growth curve changed radically and hasn’t slowed down. (The huge orange bar for March is only half the month.) But more interesting to me are two other dates: November 23, when Twitter’s growth rate sped up drastically and then on February 5, when the rate seriously slowed. Are there problems with my data? If so, I can’t find it. If you have any sense of what triggered those changes, please comment and let me know.
To help with your search, and any other visualization, I’ve posted the full Excel spreadsheet with inline charts and tables. Enjoy!
Note! The last three are cumulative charts, not month-to-month growth numbers. That means there were not 8 million messages sent this month, but 8 million total since Twitter started.
Update: Jason and I just discovered that the IDs since November 2006 have not been sequential, rendering these charts useless. The jumps in activity were largely artificial. Jason has more information.