Archive for October, 2009
Twitter receives 26M tweets per day, 22% are URLs
There has been almost no day in which, for a reason or the other, Twitter was not in the news. Millions of people love Twitter, others hate it, but everybody cannot seem to be able to stop talking about it. Sure, it is down almost once a day (but that is news too!) and they cannot find a way to monetize the service (although today they just signed a deal with Microsoft and Google, that will help), but its adoption has been massive.
Due to my researches at the University of Iowa, I look at the Twitter stream at least twice a day. After reading the Mashable article in which they claimed that looking at Compete’s numbers Twitter growth flatlined, I decided to take a look by myself.
According to my most recent studies Twitter currently receives about 26 Million tweets per day. It is impressive, especially if you consider that in January 2009 they were hovering around “only” 2.4 Million daily tweets!
As you can see from the graph attached to this post, the number of tweets started growing exponentially at the end of last year (2008), but decreased this month, going from an average of 27.8 Million tweets/day in September 2009 to “only” 25.9 Million in October 2009.
Twitter usage patterns changed drastically since they started. Long gone are the days in which it was used to keep in touch with friends and family, nowadays a growing number of people use this service as an RSS feed reader or to share pictures, videos or links that they like.
My latest analysis of the stream say that in October 2009 about 22.3% of all the tweets contain a link. We are talking about almost 5.8 Million of URLs exchanged every day! Of those, 6.2% are pictures and almost 0.1% are videos.
No wonder many companies (e.g., OneRiot, Collecta, Tweetmeme) started fetching and indexing those links to create human-powered realtime search engines. And now, Bing and Google are in that game too.
Low Cost Airlines should have an API
If you live in Europe there are many opportunities for visiting the rest of the continent without spending much. There are more than 60 low cost airlines (e.g., Ryanair, EasyJet, …) and today they fly almost everywhere. Here are a couple of examples: two-ways ticket Pisa-Paris is about 50 euros in December, London-Barcelona about 80 euros.
The smart traveler probably figured out by now that can also use low-cost airlines to connect with the hubs of big airlines and save on all its travels. For example, a trip to New York City costs thousands of euros on average, but hopping through London with a low-cost flight can shave more than half of the cost. I do it regularly from Pisa to Denver, flying to London with Ryanair and then using British Airways.
Unfortunately, finding those deals is very complicated, if not impossible, for the average customer. Those flights and airlines are not listed in the normal ticketing system and thus Expedia, Orbitz or your local travel agent will not help you to find them.
You have to visit the site of your local airport, finding out which low-cost airlines fly there and where they go. Then manually go and check each site for dates and prices. That $50 weekend in Amsterdam exists, it’s just hard to find.
The solution? Open APIs and entrepreneurial spirits.
Low cost airlines should provide APIs to:
- Given an airport, list reachable destinations and flight times
- Given a route and a date, show ticket prices for a 2 week range
Then just sit and wait a couple of weeks. Smart kids around the globe will create mashups between those APIs, Google Maps, Wheater.com, OpenTable, TripAdvisor and who knows what else.
Those application will suggest you cheap weekends getaways from your local airport (or one nearby) using low-cost flights and checking forecast and travelers opinions in a simple calendar view, will show you ways to get on-time to that amazing Munich-Chicago flight deal on Wednesday morning without having to sell your car to buy the ticket from Lufthansa, or combine multiple low-cost carriers to fly you from Barcelona to Frankfurt for the cost of a DVD.
Airlines will be happy, because to buy the tickets customers will have to follow a link to their official site (landing directly to the checkout page), where they will able to rule their reign and continue to propose their “car/hotel bundle packages”.
Customers will be happy, because they will be able to finally afford to travel around and will get to know all the options available.
Entrepreneurs will be happy, because will have a new fertile ground to build the next travel app (last one was Kayak). And even if the airlines will not offer affiliate programs (e.g., give 3% of the ticket price to the author of the site) to make their API more interesting, I am sure that smart entrepreneurs will find other ways to generate revenues for their sites.
