London really is the capital of Twitter

by Camille Jouneaux in News on 15 January 2010 at 15:02 Google+

After their initial report in June, Sysomos have taken a fresh look at the Twitter population breaking things down by country and also by city.

The US is still the country with the largest amount of users, however the influence of Americans has waned, with only 50.88% of the Twitter population vs. 62.14% in June. The UK is still on the podium, but only in third. Brazil is now the second biggest country with 8.79% of total users whereas the UK represents 7.20% of accounts.

London can be proud that it’s the capital of Twitter, with 2.08% of users, almost 25% bigger than its nearest rival, Los Angeles (perhaps due to the birth of Twestival here, which by the way has just opened registrations for their next event). However, our friends over the pond in New York are still more active than us with 2.37% of tweets coming from NY vs. 2.12% from London.

Looking deeper into the figures, there is something fascinating: the slow ascension on the platform of countries such as Brazil, India and China, three of the four BRICs. I think it’s worth keeping an eye on this – I would be curious to read a future survey comparing the economy of these countries with their presence on the international social media scene.

Update: Sysomos have released an extended list of the top countries and cities on Twitter.

http://www.nuxnix.com nuxnix

London – the Capital of Twitter – that is surely due to the vibrant startup community we have here and the melting pot of talent. BRICs is an outmoded term anyway – only having an I in order to have a vowel in it some commentators say.
stedavies

Results are wrong I'm afraid. IP networks in the UK generally all have their location in London. So even if I'm Newcastle my IP address location still says London.

Using Google for a quick and dirty measure shows that New York has more twitterers than London:

New York = 1,390,000
http://bit.ly/5Pwok6

London = 316,000
http://bit.ly/8gyVWh
dominiccampbell

TwitterGradr seems to agree with Camille based on how people are self-declaring, which seems the best measure I would have thought?

http://twitter.grader.com/top/cities
stedavies

The Google method is also based on self declaring. Not sure, who would you trust the most to give more accurate results? Google or Twittergrader? I'd go for Google myself.

But even if Twittergrader was more trustworthy over Google it doesn't get passed the fact that the majority of IPs are based in London and so invalidate the results.
@kuito

Yesterday, i read another article about a very recent study that said Tokyo was “the most tweeter city”, but the article didn't cleared if it refers to number of tweeter profiles registered or whatever….
DominicCampbell

And you're certain there isn't the same phenomenon for other parts of the world eg New York and LA pulling in surrounding areas? Basically I think we can all agree – lots of people use Twitter in these places because they are big places and the way we do geo-location is flawed but improving. No?
http://twitter.com/PBizzle Paul Borge

Interesting point you raise on the BRIC countries. China actually has a home-grown Twitter rip-off called Fanfou, which has a fairly significant user base, along with a handful of smaller micro-blogging platforms.
nileshbansal

@stedavies I agree, IP addresses are not a good way to infer geography. And this is why sysomos does NOT use IP addresses in any way. We use our own technology to infer geography based on what you disclose – and we have bench-marked it to be over 97% accurate.
nileshbansal

@stedavies I agree, IP addresses are not a good way to infer geography. And this is why sysomos does NOT use IP addresses in any way. We use our own technology to infer geography based on what you disclose – and we have bench-marked it to be over 97% accurate.
stedavies

Fair enough. How do you explain how Google counts New York bigger than London in terms of what people disclose in their biogs? See the links in my comment above. Is Google's data inaccurate?
http://www.sysomos.com/ Nilesh

Google's number of search results are never accurate. In fact they are often off by as much as 10 times.

See the two links below. Both search for waterloo users. The first link is the first search page showing 1720 results. The second is after I go to the 17th search page and it shows only 165 results (instead of 1720).
http://bit.ly/7uL2yD
http://bit.ly/7NfhGs
http://stedavies.com/ stedavies

Good point. But even if Google's results are out by as much as ten times by ratio New York is still bigger. E.g. Let's say that the total number is only ten percent of Google results number shown, that would make New York = 139,000 and London = 31,600.

Not saying this is accurate but going off what you said about the results being ten times out it's a valid assumption.
http://www.sysomos.com/ Nilesh

Google' results are NOT always exactly 10 times off. Sometime they are close to accurate, sometime a little off and sometimes completely off. It is a mistake to even consider them useful.
http://stedavies.com/ stedavies

It's a mistake to consider Google's search results useful? Quite a controversial statement to make.
alex

Also, from Sysomos' report, ” … table showing unique Twitter users around the world from Oct. 16, 2009 to Dec. 16, 2009. ..”. This means that their data is derived from examining those who have tweeted in the 2 month period. Hence the discrepency between the google query you gave, and their data. At the end of the day, sample size in the order of tens of millions is more than sufficient for this kind of inference.
Darth Revan

stedavies 's method is all wrong because his google query is flaw, not because Google engine is flaw though.

The query captures a lot of other parts of the text in a twitter profile home page.
Using his method we will find that there are more twitter users in Haiti than in Sweden
http://bit.ly/4wSsor
http://bit.ly/7rBSXN

Check this one out too:
http://twitter.com/doRroughmusic
He's in Dallas, Texas but is included in your 'New York search' because his home page has a lot of “New York” in it.

Anyhow, my point is the google query given above is flaw. Popular term like Haiti or New York occurs very often these days, and they google query above incorrectly pull them in.
Darth Revan

@stedavies' method is wrong because his google query is flawed, not because Google is flawed though.

The query captures a lot of other parts of the text in a twitter profile page.

Using his method we will find that there are more twitter users in Haiti than in Sweden
http://bit.ly/4wSsor
http://bit.ly/7rBSXN

Check this one out too:
http://twitter.com/doRroughmusic

He's in Dallas, Texas but is included in your “New York” search because his home page has a lot of “New York” in it.

Anyhow, my point is the google query given above is flawed. Popular terms like Haiti or New York occur very often, and the google query above incorrectly pulls them in.
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Are you kidding me? All my friends have twitter on their cell phone and it gets set off every couple of minutes when one of them tweets something like “guyz, just found best list of London Hotels” or “waching the game u?”
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