Average Twitter user has 126 followers, and only 20% of users go via website

Here are some did-you-knows to drop about Twitter:

-the average user has 126 followers;

-only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers. So if you’re looking at Twitter stats on your website, you’re probably underestimating that source of traffic by a factor of five;

-an early peak test of the service came during President Obama’s inauguration in January, when more than 300 tweets per second were being added to the message queue.

These party factoids come courtesy of Evan Weaver, Twitter’s lead engineer in its services team, who gave a talk at QCon 2009 to explain the architecture of the system - which started out as a sort of small content management system, but has morphed into a “messaging system” of sorts. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk