Follow Up: The Women Really Do Tweet More!

02 Oct 2010 As Aerliss quite rightly pointed out, taking an average over the last 2 weeks isn't that accurate for anyone who has been uncharacteristically quite or talkative over that period. Problem was, I couldn't get numbers for further back than that.

In fact, it turns out the numbers I would've gotten with the Twitter API, I can get in browser by going to, for example http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/oatz.xml.

And what you can get in there is the date a user joined and their total number of tweets, which means you can work out a 'lifetime average'.

For those interested, here is the code that turns date joined into number of days online.

Anyway. I ran the numbers. Some were surprisingly close to those I got yesterday. Others were wildly out.


The Numbers

What I found was that there are 3 particular outliers - 3 women who are WILDLY more talkative that anyone else I follow.

So for the sake of naming and shaming, and so you can all feel vaguely competitive with each other, here are the numbers:
Sorted by rate, coloured by gender. Click to enlarge.


Needless Complaining

Now, I do still have some qualms with this approach. For example, I joined last May. But there was a period of around 6 months when I never went on Twitter. So if we could exclude that period my average would be more representative of my tweet rate (and higher). That said, my average is still one of the higher ones.

I don't know if and how this affects other people, but there are some cases where the lifetime-averages are dramatically different to the 2week-averages.

Still, it does give me some of the numbers that were missing from yesterday's. So pros and cons. But in all honesty, drawbacks aside, I do trust these numbers more than yesterday's.


The Results

Enough waffling, here are the revised results:

Men:
Average = 5.29 tweets/day
Standard Deviation = 4.93

Women:
Average = 19.21 tweets/day
Standard Deviation = 24.94

So yeah. I wasn't imagining it. The women I follow really do tweet (on average) a lot more than the men!


A Graph

To show the spread - but mostly just because I can - here are the rates plotted on a graph (natural-logarithmic scale). Blue squares are women, orange diamonds are men.
So with the women you have a big clump in the middle and a handful at the extremes, whereas the men are sort of more evenly spread.

Even if you exclude the 3 female 'outliers', the average - 7.28 - is still higher than the men's, although the standard deviation becomes lower than the men's.

If you include me in the men's average, theirs still only goes up to 5.79.

So there you have it.


Random facts

- Of the people I follow, abooth202 has been on Twitter the longest - 966 days - with 5th November 2010 being his 1,000th day.

- miss_popcouture has posted the most tweets in her time on Twitter, with a heroic 49,922.



Oatzy.


* All figures correct as of 2nd October 2010. Subject to variation over time.