The Second Cup: 27 Million Tweets a Day

Posted by Meghann Olshefski
Fri, 2009-11-13 11:23

Are Any Members Of Congress Still On Myspace?

Its garish colors and pop-up jingles have finally driven nearly all of the US Congress from MySpace. Unfortunately, they've left behind a lot of their constituents.

Plenty has changed since the spring of 2007, when MySpace was seen as a potentially invaluable tool for politicians. A close look at all 100 senators' social media efforts shows that only 39 of them have profiles on the Murdoch-owned social network; of those 39, only 11 have signed in since the summer. A less rigorous look at the House supports this trend. It's one thing for a blogger, a media outlet or an advocacy organization to flee a social network for greener pastures, but aren't Congress members using social media for slightly different reasons?

IE 6 Is Almost Dead, But Not Quite

Internet Explorer 6 is the bane of web developers existence.  The browser doesn’t support web standards that have become common the last few years, and making sites work in IE 6 adds significant time to the web development process.  Despite the release of IE 7 in 2005 and IE 8 in 2009, a full 10% of users still use IE 6.  In other words, it is still too big of a group to ignore.

Pingdom Says People Are Tweeting 27 Million Times a Day

Twitter may be having trouble finding new users in the U.S., but its existing users in the U.S. seem to be putting out a majority of the Tweets, which are now averaging 27.3 million a day. According to data provided to us by Pingdom, the pattern of Tweets follows waking hours in the U.S. (see chart), even though comScore data suggests more than half of Twitter’s users are from outside the U.S.

While this data is only a snapshot of the Twitter activity in the three weeks between October 21 and November 11, it does show that the number of messages sent out over the service is approaching a massive scale. 

And...Harry Reid Goes Mobile with a healthcare petition.