• The Guardian, Tuesday, June 30, 2009 10:56 AM

The Guardian has some interesting stats about Twitter, which were disclosed by Evan Weaver, Twitter's lead engineer in its services division, who gave a talk at QCon 2009.

-The average Twitter user has 126 followers

-Only 20% of Twitter's traffic comes through the Twitter Web site; the other 80% comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. This means that if you're looking at only twitter.com generated stats on your Web site, you may be underestimating the source of that traffic by a factor of five.

-During President Obama's inauguration in January, more than 300 tweets per second were being added to the message queue.

Weaver's talk was mainly about how Twitter started out as a sort of content management system, but later morphed into more of a messaging system. His job centers around optimization and scalability, which couldn't be more important to a site that has experienced the kind of growth that Twitter has.

Read the whole story at The Guardian »