16,000 Irish People Are Twits

PR Log (Press Release) – Jun 15, 2009 – Twits, tweeps or twats.  Whatever you call them - agtweet.com has counted 16,000 of them over a week long survey in June.  The figure is based on the number of people spotted sending out tweets using twitter.com - the popular social networking website.  The popularity of the site has been fueled by high profile devotees such as George Hook and Rick O'Shea along with a slew of political converts hoping to capitalise on it's popularity to grow support for recent elections.  

Curiously many of the politico's (@derossa, @deirdredeburca and @eoinryanmep) who were using the site to drum up support have abandoned ship once the big day had passed.  As for the 15,995 other estimated Irish Twitter users though there seems to be no abating their appetite for tweeting.  "We actually detected 8,000 odd people on the twitter network but only about half of those who sign up actually enter a location."  says James Kennedy, agtweet's founder.  "We started tracking the numbers of users in order to figure out how many people might use our own service".  

Irish tweets hit the net at a rate of about 10 per minute.  The most popular time of the day for tweeting is just before quitting time at 5 o'clock and the tweets keep coming thick and fast until well after the witching hour has passed.  The debate is still on as to whether there is actually anything useful to be learned on twitter but agtweet.com has noticed that there is a surge of tweets around major sporting events.  Searching for terms such as #lions at http://search.twitter.com yields a running commentary straight from the grass roots.