Pointless Rants

Twitter has been pretty strict in making sure that the public is not aware of how many users they have and this is probably for good reason.  I really think the amount of hype that Twitter has had is not justified.  So then, the question I set out to answer is quite simple and that question is, how many twitter accounts are there?

So from that point there is another question that must be asked and that is, who would know the information I’m looking for, other than Twitter?

So first I google’d around a little and I found this article on TechCrunch which had some excellent information on the subject.  Information about how user ID numbers on Twitter do not reflect the number of users that are on Twitter.

So who would know this information I seek? What company, organization or hacker would be able to tell me how many users Twitter has?? I would need to talk to someone that catalogs information, someone that knows nearly everything that’s on the web…oh yeah search engines!

Yeah I know this has probably been done already and that I’m totally over playing this but I thought it was cool ok!

I took searches for both “www.twitter.com” and “twitter.com” and started gathering numbers.

Google’s results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Awww.twitter.com

Yahoo’s results:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com&bwmf=d&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-701&fr2=seo-rd-se

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.twitter.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp

Bing’s results:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awww.twitter.com

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com

Here’s a breakdown of the information I gathered:

So to do some dirty math here we can take all the numbers there and add them together then divide them by six which gives us….

100,405,050

Then if we divide that by 6 ( the number of result sets we gathered) we get…

16,734,175

So my guess at how many twitter users there are is……

About 16 million!

This is interesting when you put into perspective that there are about 300 million Facebook users and about 100 million on Myspace I estimate.

Here’s a good link on some information and how I’m guessing the number of Myspace users…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/social-networking-will-facebook-overtake-myspace-in-the-us-in-2009

If anyone has credible information on the number of Twitter users please comment! I think there’s a lot of people that would like to know that information.