Lost amidst all the hoopla, online chatter, and unrelenting media coverage this weekend concerning Apple's iPhone 4 press conference (and the resulting fallout) on Friday morning, social media powerhouses Facebook and Twitter both announced impressive milestones which deserved to be highlighted.
As reported in this story by Samuel Axon of Mashable, Facebook is expected to reach the 500 million user mark some time this week, based on the current rate of new user sign-ups. To commemorate the remarkable achievement, the service intends to launch a new campaign, called “Facebook Stories,” which will serve as a visual memorial to all the ways the social network has changed people’s lives around the world.
To put this rapid growth in perspective, Facebook reached the 400 million user mark just five months ago. Furthermore, this time last year (July, 2009), the platform was at 200 million subscribers. Only eight months prior to that, in December of 2008, Facebook had reached 100 million users. For those keeping score at home, this represents a 500% increase in users in only 18 months. Incredible. No wonder MySpace is in trouble. Oh yeah, and one more thing: even though Facebook officially launched in February of 2004, most of its growth has come in the last two years, and it has since become the most popular social site and a cultural phenomenon.
As far as Twitter is concerned, the micro-blogging service announced on Friday that Spain's 1-0 victory over the Netherlands in the championship game of the 2010 FIFA World Cup marked "the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter's history." According to company spokesman Matt Graves, making the announcement on the company's blog, tweets per second reached 3,051 when Spain scored the winning goal, and there was an average of 2,000 tweets during the game's final 15 minutes. During the final match, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages, and at the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. The full story on WebNewser about this can be found by clicking here.
Interestingly enough, Twitter's analytics and relevance teams decided to capture and visually document all of this activity in the following Wordle infographic:
As reported in this story by Samuel Axon of Mashable, Facebook is expected to reach the 500 million user mark some time this week, based on the current rate of new user sign-ups. To commemorate the remarkable achievement, the service intends to launch a new campaign, called “Facebook Stories,” which will serve as a visual memorial to all the ways the social network has changed people’s lives around the world.
To put this rapid growth in perspective, Facebook reached the 400 million user mark just five months ago. Furthermore, this time last year (July, 2009), the platform was at 200 million subscribers. Only eight months prior to that, in December of 2008, Facebook had reached 100 million users. For those keeping score at home, this represents a 500% increase in users in only 18 months. Incredible. No wonder MySpace is in trouble. Oh yeah, and one more thing: even though Facebook officially launched in February of 2004, most of its growth has come in the last two years, and it has since become the most popular social site and a cultural phenomenon.
As far as Twitter is concerned, the micro-blogging service announced on Friday that Spain's 1-0 victory over the Netherlands in the championship game of the 2010 FIFA World Cup marked "the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter's history." According to company spokesman Matt Graves, making the announcement on the company's blog, tweets per second reached 3,051 when Spain scored the winning goal, and there was an average of 2,000 tweets during the game's final 15 minutes. During the final match, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages, and at the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. The full story on WebNewser about this can be found by clicking here.
Interestingly enough, Twitter's analytics and relevance teams decided to capture and visually document all of this activity in the following Wordle infographic:
In reviewing the chart (of which you can view an enlarged version by clicking here or on the image itself), Twitter advises individuals to think of these results like sound waves: the louder and more consistent the "sound," the bigger the impact in all directions. In addition, countries' flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag "waves" fluctuate with the frequency and consistency of tweets containing each country's hashflag.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment