I think it’s odd when I see profiles of people I know were in startups, but they leave it off the CV if the venture failed. That is too bad.
Jamie Bardin
jamiebardin
@jamiebardin they must not believe they learned anything from the “failure”. which if true, it really was a failure.
Sanjay Parekh
sanjay
@sanjay failure is only a 4-letter word if you want it to be
Josh Watts
JoshWatts
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And with this…
Celebrating the end if an era of investing in new technology companies at L Puetra Cucina.
secretsig
secretsig
so ends an era. Thanks Sig for all your support and effort in improving the Atlanta startup community. #
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Now that I’ve got some of my database woes solved I’m digging back into some interesting Twitter data again. Today, we’ll take a look at the set time zone of active Twitter users. As in the last analysis, this one is based on active Twitter users. Specifically I’m looking at the results from a set of almost 3.5 million recently active Twitter users.
When looking at Twitter users, it’s hard to use location information from profiles since some people may use a specific location (e.g., Atlanta, GA), others will use latitude and longitude coordinates, and still others will use things so arbitrary that they’re unhelpful (e.g., Earth, the Internet, etc.). Unfortunately the time zone specification also falls prey to this same issue since supplying the information is optional but the benefit is that the data, if available, is a simple number that can be easily manipulated and collated to provide meaningful information.
So here is a chart of the 3.5 million users I had captured when I ran this analysis.
Of the data that I had available, about a quarter of users had no specified time zone. I’m assuming these users are uniformly spread throughout the world so I’m just going to ignore this group.
The first interesting insight is how much larger the east coast (of the USA) users are than west coast (again, of the USA) users. I would have expected that the west coast would have been a larger number of users just because 1) Twitter is based in the Valley and 2) there are a lot of people in California. But as the data shows, this isn’t true. This same analysis has repeated over different time frames over the last week or so as I created and destroyed my database. I’m not sure what this means but it might mean that Twitter (and others) should be paying as much, if not a little bit more, attention to the east coast as has been paid to the west coast.
The other data points that pop up (but are hidden on the chart above) relate to two of the smallest time zones. The second to the last smallest is at UTC+4.5. This time zone is solely for Afghanistan. I would have thought that Afghanistan would have had the smallest representation due to challenges with Internet access and overall security. But the smallest time zone was indeed a surprise, at least for me.
Myanmar (formerly Burma) and the Cocos Islands are covered by the smallest time zone, UTC+6.5. I would have assumed there would be no Twitter users in Myanmar given that the military junta has blocked Internet access in the past and continues to restrict free and open access. I spot checked a few of these accounts and they seem to by Myanmar related. So either these folks are nearby Myanmar, mistakenly set their time zone to UTC+6.5, or somehow they have acquired Internet access within the country. Either way, I’m declining to share the numbers or specific accounts related to this area for obvious reasons. Personally I hope these people are in country and if so, I find it encouraging that they’re using Twitter to discuss their issues and the facts on the ground in Myanmar.
More to come as I continue looking at this data.
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If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been working on a Twitter app/project of my own for the last week or so. I’m still working out the kinks and some of the ideas. Because of this endeavor, I’ve been collecting a lot of data. Given that I’m a data junkie, I just had to do some analysis on what I’ve seen so far. So here you go, the first snippet of insight that may help you understand who Twitter users are and what other sites they value.
I did this analysis on a little over 1 million active Twitter users. I took a look at the sites they list in their personal URL fields to point to for more information. The majority of users (about 52%) don’t list a web site and have essentially stand alone Twitter accounts. They may have URL’s in their profile background pages but that’s not something I can easily scrape for. Additionally, about 22% of users are using a domain that showed up fewer than 1,000 times. Of those that remained, here is a breakdown of the sites represented.
As you can see, Facebook is the main site listed by Twitter users. Somewhat surprising to me is that Blogger.com/Blogspot is in second place as well as MySpace being in third place. Who knew?
Also surprising is how much Tumblr outpaced WordPress as well as where Posterous is on the list. Don’t bother looking, it isn’t on the list. Posterous had less than 1,000 references and this isn’t shown. Tumblr had about 30 times more references in my sample set.
Formspring.me has a very strong showing which is surprising given how young the service is. If the site can maintain usage and their growth momentum, it could easily jump up in the rankings. They also need to educate their users that the URL is formspring.me and not formspringme.com or formspring.me.com. Fortunately they already own formspringme.com.
Finally what surprised me was the number of people who put their email address in their URL field (it was only 0.35% but still it shows up on this list). Obviously the links don’t work since Twitter assumes a URL and not an email address. That said, this may be an area for Twitter to adapt given how many people have done this as well as how many people tried to list multiple addresses (I only counted the first URL provided if there were multiple).
One last data note – the entry for Last.fm is actually composed of multiple sites, most of which are country specific. I bundled them together since they represent the same company/service. I did the same for bit.ly since some people used j.mp instead.
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If you’ve never listened to NPR’s Intelligence Squared, you really don’t know what you’re missing. This blog is becoming more focused on intelligent (?) debate and this podcast does an impressive job at debating and analyzing issues. The recent episode is about cyberwar and if the threat has been exaggerated. If you’re interested in technology you should really listen to this episode. #
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