Torontonians are totally tethered to Twitter.
Canada's largest city is the Twitter capital of the Great White North and home to one of the largest collections of Twitter users in the world, according to a new report from market tracking firm HubSpot Inc.
In the company's quarterly “State of the Twittersphere” report, Toronto places eighth on a list of the Top 30 locations on Twitter, based on the supplied biographical information of Twitter users, while Canada ranks No. 13.
London tops the list, followed by the United States generally, then San Francisco, New York and Chicago.
The popularity of Twitter – a micro-blogging service which allows users to update their status, create friend lists and post mini messages limited to 140 characters or less using either a computer or a cellphone – has exploded in 2008, with the service's user base jumping 600 per cent this year.
The power of the service's Toronto user base as on display earlier this month when an ad hoc group of users planned a holiday party known as HoHoTo through Twitter, which ended up raising more than $10,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank.
There are now an estimated 5 million Twitter users around the world, 70 per cent of whom joined the service in the past 12 months, HubSpot said.
The service – which was founded by Google Inc. alumnus Biz Stone and his partner Jack Dorsey – has been embraced by the technology community as a way of exchanging links and news but is increasingly being used by marketers and advertisers looking to create buzz around new products and services.
Even president-elect Barack Obama used Twitter to keep supporters up to date during the U.S. election and NASA set up an account to follow the Phoenix Mars Lander.
Still, questions remain about how the company's founders plan to monetize the service.
Although Twitter has begun to experiment with various advertising models, Mr. Stone has said the top priority for the company is building out the site's infrastructure using venture capital funds and that generating revenue from the service will come later.
Investors, however, remain keen on Twitter. Last month, Twitter announced that Seattle's Bezos Expenditures – the investment firm of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos – and New York's Spark Capital had signed on as investors, reportedly to the tune of a combined $15-million (U.S.). That would place Twitter's value at about $100-million.
Still, there are signs the company is being stretched too thin. In November, Twitter shut down a service that allowed Canadians to receive text message updates on their cellphones, citing “out of control Canadian SMS costs.” Canadians can still send messages to Twitter via text message but still can not receive text message updates from their friends.
“We want to offer robust SMS interaction around the world and have not had the resources to dedicate the necessary attention to make this happen,” Mr. Stone said in a recent e-mail to The Globe and Mail.
“We're in a position now to start focusing on our SMS offerings just as we focused on stabilizing our performance and reliability. It won't happen overnight but we'll get there.”
According to the HubSpot report, between 5,000 and 10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened every day. But about 30 per cent of users are new or “unengaged” who don't post updates more than once a week and only follow a few people. The average number of Twitter feeds the average user follows is about 70.
In November, Twitter spurned a $500-million (U.S.) all stock takeover offer from Facebook. The deal reportedly broke down after Twitter became concerned that the stock the privately-held Facebook was offering wasn't worth was the social network says it is.
Prior to the global economic slowdown, Facebook held an estimated value of about $15-billion following a deal where Microsoft Corp. invested $240-million in return for a 1.6 per cent stake in the company. In the current economic climate, however, many observers now believe Facebook's value is closer to $5-billion.
Twitter reportedly became concerned that the shares Facebook was offering and claimed were worth $500-million under the old valuation are actually worth closer to $150-million today.
