The popular Twitter Statistics Service TwitterCounter has unveiled a new metric today, where the number of friends a particular Twitter user has can be identified and tracked. The service also provides top lists for different timezones / cities, and can predict how many followers a user might have based on their past rate of growth, and can chart growth in follower numbers over time. Its popular widget to show Twitter followers on a blog , site or social network was tracking over 1,203,721 unique Twitter accounts as at today.
One figure that immediately caught my eye in the new statistics was that, as at today, Barack Obama has exactly the same number of Friends as Mr Tweet!
The Next Web, always one to catch a rising star, first reported on Mr Tweet back in November 2008 – the service from Mr Tweet helps you to find friends on twitter with similar interests with two simple and powerful criteria – either finding influencers beyond your network or showing you which of your followers you should be following back, and now promotes itself with the tagline ‘your personal networking assistant‘.
Disclaimer: TwitterCounter is a service from the same people who started this blog.
Good point – I had an odd feeling that number was significant, but Maths was never my strong area.
No, it is a ‘Boris sloppy programming’ number. Used a TinyInt in the database. Changed it to int and will update the database later. Oops…
So, it’s maxed out at the integer value. If anything, that’s just sloppy programming… or bad marketing ;)
Perhaps this is a friend limit?
65536 = 2^16, so it looks like it reaches a max value.
Neither of those is an individual twitter user though. As I look down the list I see individual twitter users and it starts be more interesting.
Sorry, yes, my disclaimer note somehow got truncated in the blog post from one editing package to another.
Never mind Boris, we all appreciate small, fast databases.
From The Twitter home pages, these are the figures I got a few moments ago-
Barack:
254,830 Following, 255,976 Followers, 265 Updates
Mr Tweet:
70,991 Following, 71,654 Followers, 143 Updates