London, City of Tweets?

Davey Winder
Sunday, 09 August 2009 06:07

Business IT - Technology

The founder of Twitter says that London is the City of Tweets. One London-born Twitter user and iTWire journalist begs to differ.

So, according to Twitter founder Evan Williams, talking on the BBC 2 Newsnight show as seen in this video clip, London has more Twitter users than any other city on the planet.

Yes, that's right, more than New York and more than even the traditional home of the early adopting social networker San Francisco.

Now while I have no reason to doubt Williams when he says that the UK is "second only to the US" in terms of Twitter users and the "UK has exploded for us recently" I'm not so convinced that this really means that London deserves the City of Tweets title.

If you look at the research carried out by Sysomos which analysed some 11.5 million Twitter accounts and indexed user profiles and status updates alike, a different picture of Twitter usage emerges.

Covering the period for the first five months of 2009, the Inside Twitter report says that "New York has the most Twitters users" followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Houston, Vancouver, Paris and then London. As for the fastest growth, that's Detroit.

All of which would seem to be at odds with what Williams told the BBC. Unless when he spoke of that recent UK user explosion he meant really recently, as in the last couple of months alone.

Even when you look at the in-depth figures that relate purely to the most active 5% of Twitter users, responsible for some 75% of all Twitter activity according to Sysomos, the London City of Tweets thing doesn't add up.

For a start, a staggering 60.6% of the most active users reside within the United States and only 6.9% are in the UK. Indeed, 62.1% of all Twitter users, no matter how active they are, live in the United States.

What about if you look at it from the perspective of iPhone users, maybe that swings things back in favour of the UK? Nope, US users account for 66.6% of Twitter iPhone access while the UK is in second place on 9.3%. The same survey reveals that some 24% of all Tweets were generated by bots, and I'm not sure that they count as citizens of any country.

Mind you, I'm not sure that any of this really matters. After all, willy waving aside, surely the point of a virtual meeting place such as Twitter is that there are no geographic boundaries, nationality is an insignificance and the only race that matters is geek?