More Truth About Twitter

The “if twitter were 100 people” graphic is wrong. There should be overlap between the blue and purple groups, and the green group should only be thirty users, not fifty users.

See the original post with stats. I think it is important to vet visualizations for accuracy, no matter how pretty they are.

The first picture in this post is misleading. Mapping a data set of percentages on a graphic of 100 people creates the illusion that these numbers are mutually exclusive – for example that people who have more than 100 followers and people who create 75% of the tweets have no intersection.

People graphics should never be used to represent a set of data that has intersections.

How do you get a gender breakdown? Twitter doesn’t ask for any demographic information when you create an account so gender is something that I guess you inferred. Or do you have an inside source?

How about the loudmouths just have open mouths? That way you can still colour-code the >100 followers.

Maybe you could map the overlap by “striping” multiple colors on the same person symbol. For example, half of the purple “100 or more” people could be striped purple and blue to represent they are also loudmouths. Of course, you’d then have to decrease the number of solid blue loudmouths. Not totally sure this is visually accurate or as visually easy to read though. Just a suggestion.

Also, I’m having trouble with the 100 or more followers thing. It’s the only number that refers only to the “real world” and not the 100 people twitter world (Everything else is text or a percent of total). Maybe you could use a percent for this one too? Like, instead of saying “more than 100 followers” say something like “more than 0.00001% of the total users as followers.” This isn’t as informative though, so I dunno.

If you are getting upset over how simple the twitter world has been made with these graphs, then you are missing the point. This isn’t being presented to the National Committee to Reform and Regulate the Internet. Let it go. Calm down.

That seems about right.Just joined Twitter to see what all the fuss was about? 80% sheer drivel, 20% intelligent. Everyone sticks to each other like metal and magnets?

er, how were the colors chosen?

Should there be a “1 person is Stephen Fry”?

This is pretty dope, puts the tweet about it in the top 8%. I’m retweeting it, haha.

davvero interessante!!

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Margaret

http://businesseshome.net

Love your work here.

What software do you use to generate a 100 people chart from a raw dataset? Is there free software that’ll do this?

I would like to see another breakdown, to reflect how many of the tweeps are tweeting on behalf of someone else…not robots, but real people. How can we measure how much actual interaction is happening vs pr?

I think the dead people might be removed accounts, rather than simply very inactive ones? – It’s possible to delete your twitter account.

Great defence of and twitter and fascinating history of its development. Will circulate this to colleagues who trot out the ‘why should I care what you’re doing right now’ line.
Thanks.

There is no way to distinguish babble from other tweets without detailed knowledge of both the sender and recipients, self promotion could also be chatty and/or retweetable.There will be people who haven’t tweeted in the last week but have been/will be active at other times. Together with the other problems mentioned with the presentation of the information this ends up fairly useless.

@NashvilleSEO and Ahdok – I think the ‘dead’ accounts, which are described as empty, are the accounts where people have signed up out of curiosity and never actually tweeted. This is what distinguishes them from the ‘lazy’ accounts.

@david The first image is puzzling to me mixing up to many aspects (tweets, followers, bots …) while leaving to many people unexplained; what are the grey people doing the whole twitter day long? Maybe you could visualize as an underlying aspect the tweets per day from 0, 1, 2-9 and 10+ approximately corresponding to 85 “dead” and “lazy”, 6 “regular”, 8 “active” and 1 “loudmouth”. That would leave no grey people and also avoid the dilemma of how one can have more than 100 followers in a world of 100 people.
Anyway, thank you very much for your inspiring visualizations!