Pingdom Says People Are Tweeting 27 Million Times A Day

Twitter may be having trouble finding new users in the U.S., but its existing users in the U.S. seem to be putting out a majority of the Tweets, which are now averaging 27.3 million a day. According to data provided to us by Pingdom, the pattern of Tweets follows waking hours in the U.S. (see chart), even though comScore data suggests more than half of Twitter’s users are from outside the U.S.

While this data is only a snapshot of the Twitter activity in the three weeks between October 21 and November 11, it does show that the number of messages sent out over the service is approaching a massive scale.  Pingdom estimates that the average number of Tweets per hour is 1.1 million, with fluctuations between 567,000 and 1.8 million Tweets per hour over the period Pingdom sampled Twitter’s public timeline. At the current rate, people are sending out 10 billion Tweets a year.  It was only last month that the 5 billionth Tweet was sent out.

To put that into perspective, Yahoo recently reported about the same number of status update messages going through Yahoo Mail and Messenger, which has at least five times as many users. Tweets still don’t match email however. Yahoo members alone sends out 100 billion emails a month.

It still seems far-fetched now, but one day people may send out more Tweets than emails, a topic we will explore next week at our Realtime CrunchUp. How many of you already do?