I find it shocking that so many people rely on a single (centralized) source for their communication. The internet was built to be de-centralized (see how DNS, email, tcp/ip works), but now we are moving to a centralized, unreliable means of communication..

Haven't we been doing that for ages with things like MSN/AOL messenger? Isn't this just an extra means of communication, instead of a replacement as you're suggesting?

Before there was ICQ, AIM, YIM, and AOL instant messenger, there was talk, zephyr and other distributed instant message systems that worked just fine over the internet.

After, there's XMPP.

Most people have no idea that DNS, email, or tcp/ip are decentralized (or even exist).

Shocking, really? The world will not fall apart if I'm not able to see Robert Scoble's foursquare check-ins any longer.

All of the posts on twitter don't come from some single source. There are millions of people posting things.

But there is a single company in charge of the service... if that company disappears or the company servers shut off, your messages will disappear (just as it happens when twitter shuts off).

Don't worry, it will get federated pretty soon. Remember when AOL owned instant messaging?

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but IM is about as far from distributed as it gets. There are only 3-4 big players in a given country, on the high side. Better than Twitter maybe, but just barely.

It's pretty hard to draw any conclusions at all from this.

The number is very low compared with other communication mediums - IRC, IM, SMS, Email, facebook. Clearly they've grown well, but they have a long way to go yet.

The other point is that a large(ish) proportion of twitter seems to be bots and automated tweeting. It's hard to guess how much though.

>> "These numbers are definitely noteworthy and provide evidence against the perception that Twitter is not growing"

It doesn't provide any insight into what is growing though. Are people genuinely using twitter more, or are bots using it more, spammers, PR etc

Except the post explicitly mentions that spams are removed.

"Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam."

Yeah call me crazy, but I expect there's a large amount of spam, bots, auto reposters, etc included in there.

It's hardly a trivial thing to identify and remove spam. Especially where your data is limited to 140 characters.

The other question would be are retweets included in the total.

By contrast, Google was averaging 400 million search queries per day in 2009.

That actually makes it more impressive to me: that's 50 million times creation of content, whereas Google is only passive.

Except strictly speaking executing a search is also producing content, of course - but only Google knows it.

50,000,000 is a lot.

But

2,500,000,000 text messages are sent each day in the USA through wireless networks when measured in early 2009.

Source:

http://www.textmessageblog.mobi/2009/02/19/text-message-stat...

http://www.freetext.com/blogs/ringtones/over-one-trillion-te...

I wonder how many of those text messages were tweets.

"even if half of tweets were sent via text message that would still only be 1% of the text message traffic."

Only if you assume everyone has zero followers (who receive tweets via SMS).

I wonder how many of those text messages are facebook status updates.

even if half of tweets were sent via text message that would still only be 1% of the text message traffic.

And 25 million tweets sent via text message is probably a high estimate.

Just looks like Gaussian noise to me.