The March Of Twitter: Analysis of How And Where Twitter Spread
To answer that question I created a visual history of Twitter's growth, feeding data from Dharmesh Shah (developer of TwitterGrader.com) into OpenHeatMap to produce an animated visualization of the service's growth …
Context & Ripple Effects
Tracking Twitter's rise from the outside is a small genre by now: kottke.org ran growth comparisons against Blogger as early as 2007, and Silicon Alley Insider catalogued which publishers captured the most value from Twitter's traffic explosion in 2009. What those pieces lacked was geography — nobody had shown where adoption actually happened.
This piece closes that gap with tools rather than official figures: HubSpot feeds Dharmesh Shah's TwitterGrader data into OpenHeatMap to animate the service's spread city by city. It lands the same month Twitter shipped its official Tweet Button — with close to a quarter of tweets already carrying links — so the analysis arrives just as sharing mechanics and third-party measurement are both maturing around the platform.
First-order effects
- Marketers and publishers gain a geographic adoption map they can act on directly — targeting regions where Twitter penetration is proven high rather than guessing nationally.
- Dharmesh Shah's TwitterGrader gets a showcase beyond its grading function: repurposed as a dataset, it demonstrates that third-party tools built on Twitter's firehose can produce analyses the company itself hasn't published.
Second-order effects
- More vendors building audiences off scraped or API-fed Twitter metrics raises pressure on Twitter to formalize data access — or to start publishing its own growth and engagement numbers to control the narrative.
- The Tweet Button rollout compounds the effect: easier link sharing generates more measurable activity, feeding the very datasets analysts like Shah rely on.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform growth becomes a publicly visualized artifact produced by the ecosystem rather than the company — independent dashboards setting the terms of how a network's expansion is judged before official metrics exist.
The trend: Social platform adoption is increasingly measured and mapped by third-party toolmakers working from API data, making geographic growth a public metric ahead of any official accounting.