Twitter Global Pulse - The Japanese Earthquake

Twitter's visualisations show the flow of information (tweets) during major events; in this case the recent Japanese Earthquake.  There was a 500 percent increase in Tweets from Japan as people reached out to friends, family and loved ones in the moments after the earthquake.

The first clip shows the volume of @replies traveling in and out of Japan in a one-hour period just before and just after the recent earthquake.

Replies directed to users in Japan are shown in pink; messages directed at others from Japan are shown in yellow

The next clip shows the worldwide retweets of Tweets that originated in Japan, showing the spread of information from original Tweets through those who pass them on to others.

Senders’ original Tweets are shown in red; Tweets retweeted by their followers in the hour after the event are displayed in green.

 

Source - Twitter Blog

Odeo Dough - Twitter Turns Five

From a simple idea five years ago Twitter has grown into a worldwide social media phenomenon with 220 million account holders.

When Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone of the Odeo team came up with the idea for a status update system in January of 2006, they had to call it 'Twittr" as the domain name they really wanted was owned by a birding enthusiast.

All that as they say, is bird seed under the bridge now that Twitter is producing some 350 billion tweets daily. Considering they had just 224 tweets on launch day this is not a bad effort, Compare these figures to those Google+ are crowing about, delivering one billion items daily and Facebook who are sharing four billion items.

It took Twitter sixteen months to sign up the first 600,000 accounts and now they are achieving  the same volume in just one day.

Related articles

• How Twitter Was Found (carsport268.wordpress.com)
• Exclusive: The story of the (almost) forgotten European behind Twitter - and his new startup (eu.techcrunch.com)
• The inspiration for Twitter? AOL's AIM (thenextweb.com)