In a jiffy, I used Twitter’s improved web search feature which now allows searching by name and location. Do note that the search results aren’t 100% reliable since it requires users to declare their origin, and that the search applies for both name and location (e.g. if username included “singapore”). For some of us, ballpark figures are all we need.
So what can we make from this?
For one, Japan is surprisingly big on Twitter, but hey, what happened to China? I believe that countries like China have their own localized Twitter clones, which may explain why national and twitter user populations aren’t relative. Also, being a fairly new medium, Twitter might not have caught on with the rest of the world just yet, even though twitter supports multiple languages.
Feel free to use the chart as you please, and do drop a comment if you can make anything else out of it. Perhaps a starting point for further research.
Update 1: Virtual China (an awesome Boing Boing of Chinese cyberculture) has more on two Chinese twitter clones, Jiwai.de and Fanfou.
Update 2: Here’s another “twitter use by country” chart straight from the twitter blog (20th Feb 2008)
