The other day I (and a lot of other people) questioned whether Iran might prove to be Twitter's defining moment, the time when it proved that it is not just about inanity and 'look at me' chest puffing.
No, it wasn't the 'Twitter revolution' with Twitter being very thin on the ground in Iran, but the micro-blogging service out ran mainstream news services to the point that you could catch the BBC 10pm flagship news having a correspondent monitor Twitter to see what was going on.
With the Guardian Council in Iran now having certified the so-called results, the Web Ecology Project, affiliated with Harvard and MIT, produced a report on the 'first 18 days' after the initial election results were announced. Some impressive stats in there including:
From 7 June 2009 until the time of publication (26 June 2009), there were 2,024,166 tweets about the election in Iran.
The Web Ecology Project says 480,000 took part in the Iran conversations. If we assume 20 million tweeple worldwide of which 10 million are active, then that would be almost 5% of the active Twitter user base.
As with Twitter as a whole, a small number of 'power users' dominated with the top 10% accounting for 65.5% of total tweets.
Will the usual Western disaster fatigue settle in now that the protests are dying down? The graph above shows that even 18 days later on 25 June the number of Tweets were still high. However as of today, Rick Astley, Paris Hilton and (inevitably) Michael Jackson dominate. Business as usual then....though Honduras has now crept into the list as well.
Related articles by Zemanta- Paris Hilton Shares Michael Jackson Photograph on Twitter (shoppingblog.com)
- Friday Poll: And for Twitter's next trick... (news.cnet.com)
- Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together (ethanzuckerman.com)
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