Lots of people included the string of letters "SXSW" in their Twitter updates during the five days of SXSW Interactive this year—and last year as well. We thought it would be fun to visualize and annotate some of the surges so Jason put together this graph.
Something we were watching very closely this year during the conference was service reliability. The thin brown line across the top of this graph represents the 99.97% uptime Twitter measured during the week.
Twitter's traffic comes from SMS, Instant Message, Mobile Web, and all those wonderful API projects out there. However, we also have good old-fashioned web traffic. 60% of our web traffic comes from outside the United States and this chart shows the top ten non-US sources.
Update: Remember this is just web traffic. It doesn't include any of the other popular ways that people use Twitter. For example, Australia ranks 6th if we look at SMS usage. We'd get altogether different numbers if we looked at instant messaging, m.twitter.com, and API devices such as Twitterrific.
This graph shows the number of mentions each candidate received in Twitter updates during a 4 hour period on the evening of Super Tuesday. Each candidates' share is expressed as a percentage of the total messages sent mentioning any candidate. For Gov. Romney and Sen. Clinton, an update was included if it mentioned either the first or last name of the candidate.
Super Tuesday was another big day for Twitter. Here's a chart showing the percent of activity increase over normal daily activity. Like the Super Bowl graph, we've annotated the peaks with the corresponding events related to the primaries.
We're on a roll after looking up that Super Bowl information. This graph illustrates the distribution of relationships in Twitter—specifically the number of people folks follow as well as how many people are following them.
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So, if you have about 10 followers and you're following about 10 people then you're Twittering away with a solid 50% of others like you using Twitter. If have more than 80 followers and you're following more than 70 people then you are in the Twitter minority—about 10%.
As expected, Super Bowl Sunday was an active day on Twitter. We thought we'd share some info about the day. This graph shows the percentage of updates per minute during the big game normalized to the average number of updates per minute during the rest of the day.
The blue line represents updates during the Super Bowl and the green line represents updates during the same time the Sunday before. The updates per minute are smoothed to 5 minute rolling averages and we've annotated the spikes so you can see what people were Twittering about. It's fun to see the real-time nature of Twitter updates during the shared event.
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Click image to see bigger graph
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Click image to see bigger graph
Click image to see bigger graph
Click image to see bigger graph
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