[REBLOG] Interesting fact: more Tweets posted are 28 characters than any other length [Updated]

This article was originally posted on TheNextWeb.com on January 7, 2012, by Matthew Panzarino. You can read the original article here.

If you’ve ever wondered how long the average Tweet is, then this graph should answer some questions for you. Created by Twitter employee Isaac Hepworth, it is a sampling of 1 million Tweets published on the network, excluding retweets. The graph is plotted out by number of characters and allows for a couple of interesting conclusions to be drawn. Updates below.

Among those is the fact that most Tweets are around 30 characters long. To be exact, Hepworth says that the spikes are at 28 and 31.

In addition to the average length, there is also a rather large spike at 140 characters. At first this might seem suspicious, but Hepworth brings up a good point when he attributes it to either Tweets that are edited down to the max character limit in order to fit, or split into multiple Tweets when they can’t be made to fit.

It also seems that once people get to around the 100 character range, they’re in it for the long haul, as it slopes back upwards at 120+ characters. This may be attributable to link-shortened URL’s that are Tweeted out with post titles from blogs and websites. Most titles from publications, like this one, attempt to deliver the maximum amount of information, while still leaving room for URLs and space for re-tweeted opinions. The 110 character point is roughly the sweet spot.

Does this graph fit in with your Tweeting habits? Does it make you feel like sending more 115 character Tweets to stand out from the crowd? Let us know in the comments.

Update: Interesting. Hepworth posted up a second chart that represents just tweets from the ‘desktop’ web client and it shows an even more pronounced spike at the 140 character limit. This would indicate that those Tweets are more likely edited down to the maximum length, rather than filled out automatically using a service like Twitlonger.

You’ll note that the spikes at 28 and 31 are gone as well, although the overall trend towards 30 characters remains.

I chatted briefly with Hemsowrth about his findings and he was quick to correct me on the ’30 character length’ numbers. In fact 28 characters represents the mode value of the sample. This means that there are more Tweets in the sample that are 28 characters in length than any other number, but these don’t represent a majority overall.

Meet graph.tk, a great utility if you forgot your graphing calculator

Website: graph.tk.

It does nothing more and nothing less than you’d expect it to. Simply put, it graphs functions of all different kinds!

The interface is beautiful not because it has a thousand buttons, but because it is so simple and straight to the point. Here’s what you see when you load up the website:

In case you're wondering what that function in the right hand top corner is, it's a derivative.

You can add almost an infinite number of functions, and toggle their display via the colored checkboxes. And this isn’t your ordinary Cartesian coordinate grapher; it can even handle polar functions and inequalities! The controls are very intuitive: use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out, and left-click + drag to pan around. There’s even a screenshot option built-in to the page so that you can take a picture of your beautiful graph! The equations are displayed as you would expect to find them in a mathematics textbook (with LaTeX), and for you tech geeks, it’s built with HTML5 and it’s open source.

The only caveats to this otherwise awesome web app are that you can’t find points of intersection or roots of a function so easily… but that’s where your high school/college algebra skills come in!

I would give this app an overall rating of 9/10 (10/10 if only it had tools to find intersections/roots), and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a quick graphing calculator because they’re too lazy to go downstairs and get their backpack.

For more information, visit their about page.

Blog Stats for April 2010

The biggest attractor this month was my opinion on how the lost iPhone was a planned leak. This story brought the most viewers to the blog, as you can see by the spike around April 20th. Also on the spotlight was my San Francisco trip, which didn’t garner so many views, but I still thought it was awesome.

Blog Stats for March 2010

February 2010 Blog Report

Well, I re-decided against stopping blog reports for a while… kind of. From now on, blog reports won’t be a lot of detailed statistics, it will be a line graph of day-by-day visits, and I think that’s what most people are interested in.

So, here’s the viewage graph for February 2010: