Recent Twitter Volume
Here is my estimate of worldwide Twitter volume since November 7th.
A few things to note:
* The growth in overall tweets per day has slowed a lot since the beginning of the year – it started to stall a bit in the autumn. Recent Comscore results show that visits to the Twitter website began to slow over the same period.
* My method for estimating tweets has changed since my last Blog post on the subject. On November 4th, Twitter rolled out a new ID numbering system called Snowflake that makes it impossible to estimate the rate of tweets simply by subtracting id numbers.
I came up with a new method for estimating Twitter volume that involves counting “collisions” in the id numbering system (these collisions are recorded in some of the bits of the new id numbers). The rate of collision rate is predictable given an underling twitter rate. Given a large enough sample, you can infer the twitter rate fairly accurately using an equation related to the well known “birthday paradox”.
If you’re a nerd, and would like more details about my method, drop me a note!