Posting lions to Twitter
December 10th, 2009 | Tags: culture, measurement | 3 CommentsI worked this out the other day, and it made me smile.
If you were to take all the text posted to Twitter in a single hour at a peak time of day (around 1.5 million messages, according to Tweespeed at the time of looking), and print it out on normal 80gsm paper, single-sided, single-spaced in 12pt Courier New, that hour’s worth of Twittering would weigh around 250kg.
Which is roughly the weight of a lion. Quite a large one.
Suddenly Twitter’s bird logo looks a bit out of place.
I sometimes get a bit scared about how much stuff there is in the world when I open Flickr’s home page and see a stat like ’4,800 uploads in the last minute’. The last minute!
How did you work that out?
Richard – terrifying, isn’t it? My other scary stat is that 20 minutes of footage is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Which makes YouTube minutes a bit like dog years, I guess.
Dan – The mode length of Twitter post is c92 characters (http://tweetpoll.cloudapp.net/). 1.5m x 92 = 138m characters. Typed out as specified above (excluding usernames) using MS Word default margins that would cover 50,587 A4 sides. An 80gsm (i.e. standard printer paper) sheet of A4 weighs 5g, which x 50,587 is 252.935kg. That’s about the upper weight limit of an adult male lion.