Tracking Twitter’s Message Growth

Andy Baio measures Twitter’s growth in terms of messages posted — cleverly deriving them from the post numbers of Evan Williams’s own history:

I decided to find out by using Twitter’s founder Evan Williams himself, albeit indirectly. Since Ev’s Twitter history goes from message #28 in March 2006 to #8,281,991 about three hours ago, it’s a convenient snapshot of Twitter’s growth since it began.

My only quibble with Andy’s charts is that they make it look like Twitter didn’t take off at all until November. March–October 2006 are nearly flat in these graphs, but that’s only in comparison to the huge numbers that have come since November. Here’s a graph I whipped up showing only the growth from March through October 2006.

The lesson here is that even with a good idea and an experienced team, overnight success doesn’t happen overnight.

★ Thursday, 15 March 2007