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Barracuda Labs has published an interesting threat report that reveals some data about Twitter.
The first thing to point out is that the vast majority of people (or bots) that have signed up for Twitter do not in fact use it. 51% follow ten “people” or less. 73% have tweeted ten or fewer times. One of my favorite charts in the report plots tweets versus followers on a log-log graph. Not surprisingly the most active tweeters cluster around 1,000 followers. Most of the super celebrity accounts with the million plus followers are not active Tweeters. Conan O’Brian, a new Twitter user, has 615,000 followers but has only Tweeted 14 times. He appears on 15,310 Twitter lists, a measure that Barracuda does not track.
The most interesting aspect of Baracuda Labs’ analysis is their identification of the “Twitter Red Carpet Era”:
From November 2008 to April 2009, many “celebrities” – from actors and athletes to musicians and politicians – started Twitter accounts. We call this the “Twitter Red Carpet Era.” It was during this time, 27 of the top 50 and 48 of the top 100 most followed Twitter users joined and began tweeting and promoting the service on a daily basis. With the increased visibility of Twitter, the millions of fans of many of these celebrities also joined Twitter, causing the Twitter growth rate to spike – from 2.02% in November 2008 to 21.17% in April 2009.
49% of Twitter accounts were created during the Twitter Red Carpet Era.
In their analysis of Twitter scams and attacks Barracuda makes the valid point that bad guys are following the flood of newbies to Twitter. They measure “Twitter crime” as the percentage of new users who have their accounts suspended by Twitter, a peak of 12% last October. If you assume, as I do, that Twitter is not actually very effective at identifying the accounts that have nefarious purposes I think it would be safe to assume the rate is double that: one in four Twitter accounts are not real people.
Read the latest Barracuda Labs report. It is high on data and low on hype.
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