find some secret twitter stats..

I love finding new opportunities to see new information even if around 50% of marketers are supposed to feel overloaded with data (Forrester) – if you think about how much data is out there, it is not difficult to understand the issue. The difference is that everyday there are new and simpler ways to act on that data and do something useful. The trick is to approach it in small bites and understand what you want to achieve.

Anyhow, before I get sidetracked on data – this is more informational and interesting than a tool to deal with data better. Inside twitter there is a way to favourite tweets. It is not the greatest feature ever as it is not searchable so you only ever browse through the most recent items. I have ended up using it more as a save for later feature than a favourite/like feature.

Favstar.fm allows you to see who is favouriting your tweets as well as showing a leaderboard for the most favourited/most recent tweets. v cool

As I said, more interesting than anything else – it did allow me to find some new people on Twitter though – assuming that is a good thing

[image credit: kevin dooley]

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Vincenzo Cosenza put together this map of the most popular social networks by country, according to Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data* (June 2009). He used Many Eyes by IBM which looks like a neat tool for visualisation of data.

Been playing RSS catchup and got to my third tier of feeds which has not happened in a while (I group feeds in tiers so I always read my important feeds first.. theoretically dipping into lower tiers in decreasing amounts).

Anyhow, I found a bunch of interesting stuff:

1. Found daytum thanks to Brad Feld. It tracks anything you can count – seems relatively pointless on the surface, but I love data/statistics and am sure to find something interesting come out of it. Obviously you need to find the time to enter that data.. we’ll see how it goes (once I get an invite!)

2. Top Twitter Friends – a quick way to see you you interact with on Twitter. This also seems to confirm that Scobleizer doesnt have conversations inside Twitter (see here) – I assume that happens inside Friendfeed. It really does highlight whether you interact with a select group or anyone and everyone. Found a couple of interesting people through this as well:  Sanjay Parekh (founder of Digital Envoy) and Kris Hoet (Geek Marketer at Microsoft Europe)

3. Skribit – A lot of new websites have a feedback button on either the left hand or right hand side of their website. It is a quick and easy way to allow a user to provide feedback. Skribit does a similar sort of thing for bloggers – though in this case allowing visitors to suggest new topics. I wonder how many people will bother?!

4. Finally, it turns out that Salesforce only runs on 1,000 servers.. pretty impressive considering the 55,000 enterprise customers (and 1.5m individual subscribers!). Anyhow read more over at Techcrunch.

Having stated in the previous post that Twitter was growing, I thought I’d take a peek at what Google Trends thinks. It is interesting viewing.

Yes Twitter is steadily growing:

So it is obvious that Twitter is being looked at. It is also very obvious that one man is helping to push this growth in the UK: Stephen Fry (@stephenfry). Take a look at this breakdown of also visited sites:

Other than Stephen Fry, it looks like the other “truth” that is often said about Twitter is still holding at present: it is inhabited by marketing and media types. Both NMA and Brand Republic are major marketing websites in the UK.

In the past few weeks though, with no data to show this yet, I am seeing more of the non-marketing/media types talk about Twitter especially given the exposure in places like The Jonathan Ross show on BBC1 (thanks to @wossy talking Twitter with Stephen Fry on his comeback show); the BBC news website (again thanks to Stephen Fry); in the Independent (yes: Stephen Fry again); The Guardian (Yes you guessed it Stephen Fry) and finally on Radio 1 where Scott Mills has been “promoting” it – apparently though, he doesn’t get it.

Get it or not it is definitely placing it in front of a mainstream audience.

You can also find me on twitter here: @razorshine.

Take a look at some stats on rssmeme.

Not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was interesting to see that BBC Persian was the 46th highest source of items shared on Google Reader*. The English BBC News site is nowhere to be seen. Even the NY Times which seems have got to grips with new technologies quicker than most is at 49.

*This is only the Google Reader shared feeds indexed by RSSmeme not everyone’s.