Twitter has launched (without any formal announcement) a new profile directory, which will allow you to browse through Twitter users in alphabetical order. Some accounts do seem to be missing, however.

Amit Agarwal at Labnol.org (via Matt McGee) suggests that the directory is aimed at making Twitter profiles more visible to search engines. “People directories, likes the ones now available on Twitter and Facebook, aren’t necessarily useful to human visitors (unless you are trying to research particular names or surnames) but they are like sitemaps that help search engines bots discover every single profile that exists on the social network,” he writes. “Twitter’s people directory doesn’t have a search function but you can take the help of Google to find the existence of your name in that massive directory.”

To use Google for this, he suggests you simply search: site:twitter.com/i/directory/profiles “your name”

Twitter is displaying a link to the directory in its footer for logged out users, though Agarwal is right in that it hardly seems geared towards users without a search feature (the search box simply searches Twitter via normal Twitter search).

It doesn’t offer much but a lot of names without any context. If you’re looking for Twitter users of interest, you’re still better off with a tool like Twellow.

Twitter’s directory is good if you want to see how many other Twitter users have the same name as you:

Disclosure: Twellow is operated by WebProNews parent company iEntry.

Gooogle being Google had to go all out of course, and give thanks in interesting and creative ways…or at least try to. They ran into some hiccups as this video would indicate. Working with robotic bees, large amounts of dominoes, and writing on the moon aren’t the easiest tasks, we would imagine. 

Watch the entire video here. 

Twellow thanks Google for going to such great lengths. 

Google recently invited advertisers to tell stories about their businesses to help celebrate the anniversary, and the company shared those on a global map. 

You can still upload your story either as text or as video. If you prefer, you can just add a picture of yourself, your team, or your business. These can be uploaded here. 

According to the numbers for May, registrations were up 9.8% over April to 11.5 million, while total estimated registered users stood at 122 million (based on previous estimates of 20% suspended or deleted accounts). Tweets added rose 19.7% over April to 2.1 billion, which represents 16.2% of all tweets ever posted, Daines says.

Here is a look at his graphs:

"These numbers verify that indeed the Pingdom report of 2 billion tweets for May is accurate, as cited by Doug Caverly yesterday," says Daines. "The number of tweets per estimated registered user is up to 17.3, suggesting that active users are more active than ever in the last 12 months."

The 2 billion tweets, as Doug pointed out, works out to about 64 million tweets per day, 2.7 million tweets per hour, 44,481 tweets per minute, and 741 tweets per second.

Daines has now shared his latest numbers for Twitter – for the month of April. Total tweets sent went up to about 1.7 billion for the month, a 10.6% increase over March. New registrations rose to 10.5 million, or 6.75% over March.

"I’ve adjusted the new user registrations graph for this month to reflect the approximately 20% of disabled or suspended accounts on Twitter," explains Daines. "Total actual Twitter IDs in the Twitter system was almost 139 million, so the 112 million reflects my 20% estimate."

"I’ve taken into account the suspended accounts also on the tweets per user graph, so Twitter appears to have run at about 15.7 tweets per user for the month," he adds.

Daines also points out that he made a few corrections to his data. "March tweets have been revised down to 11.2 billion total from 11.4, and 1.59 billion for the month instead of the previously reported 1.72 billion." Our previous report for March can be found here.

Original Article: Each month, we look at Twitter’s growth based on total tweets and new user registrations. This data is supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer for our own Twitter app Twellow.

In March, the total tweets sent increased 29.8% over February, the largest month-over-month increase since July of last year. User registrations rose 19.3% over February. Tweets sent per registered user jumped almost 20% to 13.4.

"I have a little survey script that I run now and then that queries Twitter for 1,000 random users, then I put together a few statistics based on the returns. I just ran it this morning and it came in at 20.3% suspended or non-existent,"  says Daines.

Survey Summary (Total Samples: 995)*
———————————————-
protected_users: 58 (5.83 %)
suspended_users: 99 (9.95 %)
missing_users: 103 (10.35 %)
active_day_users: 45 (4.52 %)
active_7day_users: 37 (3.72 %)
active_30day_users: 45 (4.52 %)
active_30plus_day_users: 279 (28.04 %)
non_active_users: 344 (34.57 %)
bio_users: 122 (12.26 %)
url_users: 77 (7.74 %)
location_users: 206 (20.70 %)

* 5 of the 1,000 returned failwhales

"When you take into account the likely suspended accounts at a rate of 20%, then the tweets per user is closer to 16," says Daines. "Also, assuming the actual number suspended is around 20% of the total (as my previous surveys suggest), then the total actual number of Twitter users is around 102 million, so Twitter has very likely passed the 100 million user mark."

As noted, there are some estimates and assumptions involved, so we’re not going to come right out and say as fact that Twitter has surpassed 100 million. If it has, that’s still only roughly a fourth of Facebook’s latest report of 400 million users. Either way, you can’t deny the strong growth that Twitter continues to display.

In February, the number of new registrations fell, compared to the previous month, and tweeting in general rose, but the growth in the amount of tweeting slowed. "New registrations are down for February by 12.2%. Total tweets for the month rose slightly over January at 7.4%, the slowest pace since August," says Daines. "Tweets per user registration remained almost constant, dropping only 8 tenths of 1 percent."

"I did run a survey last month of 9,995 random Twitter IDs and found an estimated 20% of accounts were listed as suspended or not found, so actual registered user numbers probably run at about 80% of the numbers shown, which would be 94.8 million for February," he notes. "Tweets per user registration would be about 20% higher, which would be 14 for February."

Daines notes that he had to make slight adjustments to the past two months. "I had to revise the tweet numbers for December and January down due to a flaw in my calculations for those two months, but the tweets were still up by 16% and 19% for each month respectively."

This month Twitter is expected to launch an advertising platform, and it should be interesting to see the numbers after that. Twitter is also rumored to be readying some new features that have previously only been available via third-party apps.

"The Twellow OAuth upgrade is a major improvement for Twellow users," Twellow’s Lead Developer Matthew Daines says. "Not only is it much more secure, but it also increases the amount of interaction users can have with the Twitter universe from Twellow."

"With this version of Twellow we’ve added the ability to tweet directly from Twellow, so users don’t need to switch between Twellow and Twitter for simple posting of updates," Daines adds. "In addition there are a few behind-the-scenes improvements in performance that should help as we continue to grow our database of Twitter profiles."

Benefits include:

- OAuth is more secure
- OAuth provides the same access you are used to
- You can use a different password for Twellow
- Twitter access limits are increased with OAuth
- Tweet directly from Twellow

Current Twellow users can upgrade their accounts to take advantage by logging in with their Twitter screen name and password, entering a new password to be used with Twellow, clicking the "continue to Twitter" button, making sure they are logged into Twitter under the correct account, and clicking "allow".

In January, total tweets sent were the largest on record. However, they increased at 6.34% over December, which is the second lowest increase for the last twelve months. Only August saw a lower rate at -6.2%.

Still, new registrations saw a 32% month-over-month increase, the largest since April, and the most registrations ever in a single month at 9.4 million. These numbers were supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer for our own Twellow. He also provided the following graphs:

"The average tweets per user registration dropped slightly to 11.2, a 2.7% decrease from December," notes Daines. He reiterates his usual disclaimer, that these numbers in no way reflect suspended, abandoned, or inactive accounts.

The big increase in new user registrations has to be refreshing for Twitter. In November, Twitter saw a decline in the number of new Twitterers, a trend that had been going on since July. Finally, that leveled out in December. Now the number has grown significantly. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues into this month.
 

Related Articles:

> Twitter Starts the Year with Some New Faces

> Stone Makes "Several Billion Tweets Per Hour" Prediction

> Is it OK to Say No to Twitter?

Originally the suggested users list was meant as a way to help new users, and it still is. The problem was that the list was static for everyone, and not all tastes are the same. Now the lists will be more tailored to users’ specific preferences.

"Two of the biggest challenges for new users have been finding accounts to follow that appeal to their interests, and finding their friends and colleagues who tweet," says Josh Elman of Twitter’s product team. "Over time, we’ve learned that by making suggestions of who to follow, we can help users get going more easily on Twitter. In our new design, we’re taking some steps to continue to improve this process."

"We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences," explains Elman. "These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists."

I should note that our own Twellow service has had a feature in place that provides suggested users on a personalized level for some time, so if you don’t like who Twitter suggests (or if you just want to find others), you may want to consider checking that out.

Twitter says its lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithm identifies new users who should be suggested. Others found to be less engaging may be removed. Twitter offers its own staff-picked list, and a special staff picks for Haiti list as well.

Related Articles:

> Easily Find Twitterers You’re Interested In

> A Suggested Users List for Twitter That You Can Actually Use

> Twitter To Make Suggested Users Feature More Like Twellow’s?

In December, however, new Twitter user registrations leveled out. Number of tweets grew significantly, and the number of tweets from new users grew as well, possibly indicating that people aren’t just signing up for Twitter and not using it.

These numbers were supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer of Twellow. He says, "Twitter surpassed 1 billion tweets for the month, a 30% increase over the 892 million tweets sent in November. They also surpassed the 100 million user registrations mark by adding 7.123 million new accounts, just barely reversing a negative trend in new user registrations over the last several months with a 0.1% increase over the 7.116 million registrations in November. The number of tweets per user registration jumped almost 21% over November to 11.5 tweets per registered user."

"For the year, Twitter registrations increased almost 545% over the the number registered on January 1, 2009, while tweets sent per month increased in December 1,514% over those sent in January," notes Daines. "Again, I have no idea how many of these accounts are suspended or inactive, so the actual number of registered accounts might be less than 100 million, but the numbers seem to show growth continuing for Twitter."

The numbers seem to suggest a good start to the year for Twitter. The company also recently made some new hires (including some former Googlers) and has some interesting things in the works, such as new features for businesses and the opening of its firehose, which will lead to a lot more innovation in Twitter apps. Things appear to be looking up for Twitter.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Starts the Year with Some New Faces

> Stone Makes "Several Billion Tweets Per Hour" Prediction

> Is it OK to Say No to Twitter?