9th
Research... renowned robots?
I recently found out that all major [industrial] computer science labs have Twitter feeds. Here are some back-of-the envelope statistics.
| Followers | Time | Linear | Exp. | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2,736 | <1 month | 2,736 (100) | 3.44 (100) | |
| Microsoft | 1,708 | 2 months | 854 (31) | 1.62 (47) |
| IBM | 3,491 | 8 months | 436 (16) | 0.44 (13) |
| Yahoo! | 1,469 | 13 months | 113 (5) | 0.24 (7) |
Ranked purely by number of followers, IBM research is first. But factoring in the age of each Twitter account (rounded to the closest month), Google is way ahead: the last two columns show a number proportional to the growth rate, assuming that it’s linear (followers/age) or, more realistically, exponential (log(followers)/age).
Also ran the profiles through Twanalyst, just for fun (click links above). All four are “renowned”, “robots”. Both IBM and MS are “fair”, IBM is also a “spammer” and MS is “inquisitive”. Both Google and Yahoo are “sociopathic” (as myself… go figure) and “vain”. IBM has the most simplistic (readable) prose and Yahoo! the most complex.
[Update 5/9/2009] Just discovered TwitterCounter, and pulled the data with a Python script into Google docs to quickly create a timeseries plot (data is static). This should be a bit more illuminating than drawing conclusions based on a single data point. :)
Links to counter pages for Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Yahoo research.
[Update 6/9/2009] Re-ran Python script to refresh data.
