Twitter: Open and By The Numbers

This mor­ning, @biz (Biz Stone) and @ev (Evan Williams) kic­ked off Twitter’s first offi­cial deve­lo­per con­fe­rence, Chirp, with some facts and data and a stun­ning announ­ce­ment rela­ted to the Library of Congress.

First, the num­bers. There are 105.8 million regis­te­red users but 180 million monthly uni­que visi­tors to the web­site. The deduc­tion: non-registered users read tweets. And we know that regis­te­red users read tweets pri­ma­rily from other devi­ces. Williams noted that Twit­ter is currently hand­ling 3 billion requests a day; this API-driven traf­fic is equi­va­lent to Yahoo, he said, noting that no other major ser­vice is this distributed.

“Open exchange of infor­ma­tion has a posi­tive impact on the world,” Williams said in his key­note. Reflec­ting that sen­ti­ment, Twit­ter strea­med the event live. Moreo­ver, the ses­sions are archi­ved at Justin.tv for dela­yed viewing.

An even more sig­ni­fi­cant reflec­tion of that sen­ti­ment: Twit­ter is giving the Library of Con­gress the entire cor­pus of public tweets (think of the poten­tial for watch­dog­ging govern­ment and politicians).

Expect to see an empha­sis on the scho­larly and research impli­ca­tions of the acqui­si­tion. I’m no Ph.D., but it bog­gles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about our­sel­ves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I’m cer­tain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even pos­sibly conceive.

Just before noon, @biz explai­ned on the Twit­ter blog:

Over the years, tweets have become part of sig­ni­fi­cant glo­bal events around the world—from his­to­ric elec­tions to devas­ta­ting disasters.

It is our plea­sure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Con­gress for pre­ser­va­tion and research. It’s very exci­ting that tweets are beco­ming part of his­tory. It should be noted that there are some spe­ci­fics regar­ding this arran­ge­ment. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for inter­nal library use, for non-commercial research, public dis­play by the library itself, and preservation.

The six-month delay and non-commercial use are mea­ning­ful because they relate to poten­tial reve­nue streams for Twit­ter, the com­pany. But Twit­ter, the social engine, has res­pon­ded to public inte­rest pleas regar­ding access rela­ted to govern­ment and news. A big hurrah!

The final “open access” announ­ce­ment rela­tes to Google’s time­line search. Goo­gle Replay will let us relive a real time search from spe­ci­fic moments in time. (Goo­gle­Wave, anyone?) Although Goo­gle Replay currently acces­ses fairly recent tweets, @biz wrote that “even­tually it will reach back to the very first Tweets every created.”

Feel free to give Replay a try—if you want to unders­tand the popu­lar con­tem­po­ra­neous reac­tion to the reti­re­ment of Jus­tice Ste­vens, the health care bill, or Jus­tin Bieber’s latest album, you can vir­tually time tra­vel and replay the Tweets. The future seems bright for inno­va­tion on the Twit­ter plat­form and so it seems, does the past!

Finally, one of the coo­lest arti­facts to emerge from the event this after­noon is this infor­ma­tion graphic crea­ted by Gerardo Obieta (@G_Obieta), a graphic desig­ner who works for Weber Shand­wick Min­nea­po­lis. He sha­red it with the world via Twit­ter and TwitPic.

:: This post first appea­red at wired­pen
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