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Tweet for tweet: Top 30 cities on Twitter

Rick Turoczy on April 9, 2008

Portland-based TwitterLocal, the service built by Matt King that allows you to create an RSS feed of Twitter users for a particular location, has just moved added a feature that takes the site from a one-time visit to a regular destination—a leader board for the top 30 cities on Twitter.

The leader board currently ranks cities by the number of tweets by residents in a rolling 24-hour period.

Glancing at it a few minutes ago, Tokyo was in the lead with San Francisco running a close second. Paris leads the Europeans. And our hometown of Portland is sitting around #14 or so.

From 8:00PM, April 8, 2008 through 8:00PM, April 9, 2008, the list looked something like this:

  1. Tokyo
  2. San Francisco
  3. New York City
  4. 寅島市南区
  5. Paris
  6. (Japan)
  7. (Entre mi cuarto y mis zapatos)
  8. London
  9. São Paulo
  10. Los Angeles
  11. Chicago
  12. Seattle
  13. Toronto
  14. Portland, OR
  15. Boston
  16. Washington, DC
  17. (United States)
  18. Austin
  19. (Mexico Distrito Federal)
  20. (California)
  21. Atlanta
  22. Taipei
  23. Sydney
  24. London
  25. Osaka
  26. (Brazil)
  27. Madrid
  28. (Mexico)
  29. Melbourne
  30. Barcelona

As you can see, there is some weirdness can show up in the results. King notes these flaws in the system:

  • The seemingly high count of random places like “my pc”, “cybertron”, etc. are the geocoding service’s way of having fun. It seems some fake locations get assigned coordinates to somewhere in Kansas.
  • There is also a very high count of locations with asian characters, which again the geocoding services give only one location. Other than that the numbers are fairly accurate.

Despite these minor foibles, TwitterLocal’s leader board is the first location-specific Twitter analysis that I’ve encountered which actually begins to show which locations have caught the Twitter bug.

And as impressed as I was with TwitterLocal’s service, I’m sure to find this type of competitive ranking completely addictive, at the very least. I’m sure I’ll be checking TwitterLocal leader board, obsessively, over the coming months to see if we can get Portland to crack the top 10. At the very least.

Did your hometown make the list? There’s only one way to find out.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy

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  8. Todd Kenefsky April 10, 2008 at 6:36 am

    oops, looks like my prior comment didn’t get through:

    I calculated tweets per thousand for Portland; the top ranked city, Tokyo; and the city ranked just higher than Portland, Toronto:

    Tokyo 1.13
    Toronto 1.57
    Portland 6.84

    On a per capita basis, it’s not even close.

  9. Todd Kenefsky April 10, 2008 at 6:31 am

    Add San Francisco into the mix and things get interesting. Tweets per thousand:

    Portland (city) 6.84
    San Francisco (city) 1.62

    But our metro populations are different. Including Hillsboro and Gresham waters down Portland’s stats immensely while the inclusion of Silicon Valley bumps up the Bay’s numbers a bit.

    San Francisco (metro) 1.71
    Portland (metro) 1.66

    I consider Portland the per capita champion. When we tell people they should move to Portland, we don’t mean that they should move to Milwaukie or Tigard. Portland means PORTLAND (sorry outliers). But when we talk of San Francisco, especially in terms of technology, we very much mean Santa Clara, Mountain View, Menlo Park etc.

  10. Todd Kenefsky April 10, 2008 at 6:01 am

    I calculated tweets per thousand for Portland; the top city, Tokyo; and the city ranked just above Portland, Toronto (from population figures on Wikipedia).

    Tokyo 1.13
    Toronto 1.57
    Portland 6.84

    On a per capita basis, it’s not even close.

  11. Aaron B. Hockley April 9, 2008 at 9:37 pm

    The metro area thing is a biggie and might make this more representative. My location is Vancouver, WA so I don’t count for the Portland totals. Similarly, if someone says Redmond, they’re not going to show up as Seattle. Should they? Maybe.

  12. Jmartens April 9, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    okay, so who is going to look up the metro area populations of the top 30 and figure out how we rank per capita?

  14. Tom Turnbull April 9, 2008 at 8:20 pm

    OK, I declare Portland #1 in terms of tweets per capita. Perhaps, I’m a bit too competitive 🙂

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