Twitter – ten months in Australia now, apparently
As Australia’s national media writers prepare for their short six or seven week holiday, The Australian’s Media section today offers its wrap-up of the year.
Intriguing to learn that in February the bushfires “heralded the arrival of a new media channel on Australian shores as micro-blog Twitter became a newfound communications tool for media and the public.”
For those looking forward to shortly celebrating Twitter’s fourth birthday, that may come as something of a surprise.
I guess that means the rest of us must have been twittering while driving at 88 mph in a Delorean time machine. Either that, or we weren’t in Australia (-:
Just to clarify Tim, we were not saying that was the date Twitter arrived in a physical sense, more in a metaphorical one with both media and the public embracing it on a broad scale tweeting about the bushfires _ it was a level of mass tweeting we had not seen in Australia before.
Cheers
I’d beg to differ with Simon, but I’d have to rely on one of the Mavens to come up with a factual example to prove it.
I’m not a “maven” by any means, but I did recall seeing this piece in ZDnet in January ’09, and then this one on a blog in late April ’09, which would seem to point to 2009 being the year that Twitter really became something that mainstream Australians were cottoning on to.
If the numbers in the 28 April ’09 piece are correct, and Australian visitors to the Twitter site surged 1067% between January ’09 and April ’09, that implies to me (as a layman, granted) that The Australian wouldn’t have been far off in pegging the Feb ’09 bushfires as the start of Twitter as a “big thing” in Oz.
I say “if” they’re correct because I saw another piece making the rounds a few months back which cited Nielsen in saying “Twitter was up 979% to 1.5 million in August 2009” (from August ’08), and not being a meeja guy, stats like these aren’t exactly my forte..,.
On the subject of “those looking forward to shortly celebrating Twitter’s fourth birthday,” I wouldn’t know how many Australians have actually been using Twitter that long – again, I’d guess it’d only be the techy early adapter types. My gut feeling tells me it was more like 1-1/2 to 2 years ago that I started hearing about it at all, in an Australian context. If you want, out of curiosity’s sake, you can plug anyone’s account name into this tool and it will tell you when they first opened their account.
Anyway, just my 2 cents’ worth as I wait on hold with Telstra… XD