3. Twittering

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Twitter is currently experiencing exponential growth in Ireland. The “micro-blogging” system, in which users send short text-based posts to people who have signed up to receive them, now has over 8,000 Irish users according to the first survey of its kind.

While the definition of what does or doesn’t constitute an “Irish” twitterer is much longer than a tweet (a twitter message), the results of the study by Irishblogs.ie clearly echo international trends.

Irish Twitter Accounts. Scource: Irishblogs.ie

From a base of zero users at the beginning of 2006, the Irish twittersphere grew to over 1,000 users in mid 2007 and 7,939 users by early February 2009. And a survey of 152 twitter users in Ireland by ifoods.tv entrepreneur Neil Harbison found that over half (55%) were “twebies” (twitter newcomers) – twittering for three months or less.  Asked “Which Irish person would you most like to see on Twitter?”, they ranked our top five would-be twitterers (in descending order) as Brian Cowen, Roy Keane, Eamon Dunphy, Bono and Michael O’Leary.

Back to the contents of State of the Net issue 12