I was curious how popular the various methods of accessing Twitter had become. This morning, I whipped up a little script (using the Twitter XML API) to grab a random sampling of data from the public timeline (that’s the tweets by everyone–not just the people I follow). My script dumped the tweet sources (and the username associated with each tweet) data into a CSV, and after a few hours I had accumulated a random sampling of about 5600 tweets. For the curious, you can view the source data.
Here is the breakdown:
Top Twenty Ways to Post to Twitter in November 2009
A few observations:
- A little over half of tweets now come to Twitter by sources other than Twitter’s website (the “web” source).
- The “Other” category, which contains a hodgepodge of lots of small and up-and-coming applications, is the second largest source (everything in the Other category represents under 1% of total tweets). You can also add to this the “API” category (about 5%) which contains applications that haven’t identified themself–either they’re apps in development, or people experimenting.
- TweetDeck is dominating — with around 8% of total tweets, it’s the favorite non-Web way to post to Twitter. To put that in perspective, TweetDeck is about one-fifth as popular as Twitter itself is for posting tweets.
- If you add up all the various mobile methods people are using (Twitter’s own mobile interface, and popular applications like Ubertwitter or Echofon, which are primarily used by mobile users) one finds that at least 15% of tweets are coming from mobile sources.
- There are a number of popular Twitter clients (Movatwitter, PeraPeraPrv, Tween) that are in Japanese, and hosted on Japanese sites; usage of these clients represents about 5% of total tweets. I was surprised not to see a similar pattern for China or Korea.
Here are the links to all of the websites for the clients mentioned in the above analysis:
- TwitPic
- P3:PeraPeraPrv
- Snaptu
- Twit
- Twitterrific
- HootSuite
- movatwitter
- Seesmic
- Tweetie
- Tween
- MySpace
- twitterfeed
- Echofon
- UberTwitter
- TweetDeck
Enjoy this analysis? Feel free to strike up a conversation with me on twitter.
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