Tweetrush is based on the rushhour engine and aims at providing information on the volume of tweets that are sent every hour of the day. At the present 800,000 tweets are sent a day. That’s an average of 33,300 an hour. I only tweet at about 86 (not 200) a day depending on conversations.
You can see user’s tweet rate as well.
It’s a fun litle app that can help picture how twitter is growing at present.
Two weeks after twitter gave up on Europe here are a number of services you can try out.
TweetSMS
This service should be launching this weekend and some people are already testing the service
3jam
It’s up and running but requires for you to pay via paypal rather than Visa or other widely accepted cards
Twitmobile
So far not much information on the service but advertises 5p per message. Let’s see when they’re online
Hootsms
Hootsms are already up and running but as with other services you are required to pay via paypal. It allows a number of bulk buying SMS. You can buy up to a thousand sms for 50 GBP.
Zygotweet
Not much information so far.
Twittex
Appears already to be up and running.
If you’ve tried any of these services leave a comment below commenting on your experience with these services.
Over a year ago I started using twitter and it had great promise. The public timeline was so slow that I would refresh it and there would be no new comment for minutes at a time. The service would auto refresh from the website and the community was small. The @ feature didn’t exist and no one I knew was using it.
Over a period of weeks and months more and more people started to use it and following was all web based without any api. Eventually people would begin using the @ symbol to direct comments to specific people and with the increase in traffic so the auto refresh broke, and was later removed.
Later still Api support was finally offered. We would get thousands of SMS a month and the term twitter bukake was coined. It was used to describe the act of suddenly getting twenty to a hundred SMS at a time as you emerged from the tube. After a while in Europe this was limited to 250 tweets a week.
Then it died. No more tweets would get to our phones and twitter would no longer have the appeal that it had at first.
It went from being one of the most interesting and innovative and interesting ways to communicate between people in various countries to something that everyone would imitate and equal.
That’s why I’m so disappointed that there are no SMS, that’s why I think that the twitter managment have really missed a great opportunity. I’m glossing over the months of failwhales and server crashes.
I miss the old twitter.
If everything goes according to plan tweetsms will be the first to offer the world the opportunity to receive sms from twitter to their phones. They released the prices today and by Friday we should be able to use the service once the bugs are worked out. Looking forward to that moment
Twitter are stopping all SMS for many territories due to cost. They don’t need to send sms. If they had an s60 application similar to that by Jaiku they would incur no extra costs. We would simply take advantage of our dataplans to download the messages at any time that the application is running.
Worldwide we are going to find that there are a lot of dissapointed users. At the same time the centralised conversation that twitter managed to encourage will spread across a number of platforms. As a result twhirl is a good alternative whilst waiting for things to settle.
If the companies can’t behave then we’ll rely on Air applications to aggregate and monitor what’s going on. I already watch seesmic, twitter, identi.ca and friendfeed with twhirl.
All this to say something simple. If you want me to keep coming to your site provide me with the best user experience possible. If not then I’ll be as uncommitted as possible. So will everyone else
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Twitter is a shambolic mess, reminiscient of a 2008 version of how hotmail was back in 1998 when I stopped using it. How many of you remember hotmail pre microsoft. I do. It worked fine. Then it became popular and it become really slow. That’s when I spread to have ten to twenty e-mail accounts to see which would be better. yahoo mail and the account that came with the domain won until gmail came along.
Anyway twitter is a pile of rubbish but it’s better than anything else at what it does (for the moment.). It’s a shame we can’t get a reliable equivalent with an increased level of reliability. 
update: Chris Brogan lost 7000 followers. I lost 600.
The failwhale is up constantly.
Some of my favourite tweeters were unfollowed.
Thank you twitter for being down at the only moments of the day when I could chat with friends.
Today I got to 30,000 tweets, a very nice number. There was a time when I seesmiced 5700 times in one month. Recently it’s been about 700 for last month.
MG had noted that, after a week, Twitter seemed to realize that it was a problem that the replies still werenΓ’β¬β’t working, and was pointing people to Summize for a workaround. I said Γ’β¬ΕI hate having to rely on the web version of Twitter, first of all, then having the reply tab bork, and THEN having to go to summize, and hit reply there and pray that twitter works. ItΓ’β¬β’s why I only check Twitter once or twice a day now.Γ’β¬Β
So you see I’m not the only one that’s complaining about the lack of service from twitter. More and more people are getting tired. Remember when hotmail was unreliable, soon after it became part of microsoft. That’s the phase twitter seems to be in although it’s funding rather than being bought. The early adopters are “leaving” because they’re tired of the site being down but that doesn’t matter.
Awareness of twitter is going up and if within a week or two they iron out the bugs then there’s a good chance that the middle to late adopters will come and enjoy twitter. We’ve seen that in shows like TWIT the later adopters are there now. More and more people arrive and because they’re not part of the “echo chamber” that we, as the early adopters inhabit to them it’s a new service that they’re learning about.
Whilst I was not twittering I did watch the different conversations about the fail whale and how crap twitter had become and we see the negativity. Look at the timeline though and see what new arrivals are saying. What’s the point of twitter? How do I use it? Those questions mean one thing. It doesn’t matter that twitter is broken when they join for the simple reason that they don’t know what it was like before.
Now it’s up to twitter who have purged the geek community through inefficiency to take advantage of that to get many more real life conversations going rather than all this web 2.0 and marketing chatter. If twitter does make an effort I look forward to when it’s properly fixed.
As an addition taking a few days off from twitter did help me feel more relaxed about the bugs.
As a frequent user of twitter following over 1000 people it’s impossile for me to keep up with everything that’s going on. That’s especially true now that I’m going out more often, working and summer is here.
As a result of these factors I removed anyone that doesn’t @ me very often, doesn’t remind me of a conversation or doesn’t post much. As a result the signal to noise ratio has gone down and twitter should be more manageable.
In total I removed about six hundred people this morning. Now to see how things change.