The Realtime Web is difficult to analyse as it includes data from feed readers, desktop clients and mobile phones. Furthermore, socialmedia applications like Twitter and Facebook are also just a component where third party applications like TweetDeck and Seesmic can produce realtime search on Google and Bing.
Following Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams, the data is not extensive enough.
However from the Twitter data, it can be noted that about 50 percent of Twitter API calls are outside Twitter.com. This percentage represents data going back and forth, not people, and includes data from bots and machine clicks. In order to get a better estimate of the size of the overall reach of Twitter, we need to take Google Trends data for Twitter and “key clients”. As a result, the chart above follows, where it is shown the Twitter ecosystem reaching about 60 million people, with 20 million coming from Twitter.com and 40 million coming from elsewhere. From this data, the ecosystem is twice as large as Twitter.com itself.
Applications like TweetDeck can surpass 4 million updates in a single day. Furthermore, twitterfeed now supports more than 800,000 feeds from more than 400,000 publishers.
When we add other data points into a single chart (as it can be seen below) it shows the relative growth of the Realtime Web compared to the established Web as represented by Google and Amazon. The chart also includes Facebook and Meebo, both of which are growing much faster.
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