I recently made a post regarding Facebook, and a comment made that if it was a country, it would be the third biggest one in the world. And it got me thinking as too how it might work out if Facebook really did become a country.
Well in this post i'm going to take a look at Twitter and question what sort of country it would form.
Before I go into Twitter as a country, i'd just like to give you an idea into it's current popularity.
Thier are around 2-300 Million twitter accounts, which isn't quite as much as Facebooks 500 Million active accounts, but it's still a pretty large number and almost reaches the same amount as America's population of around 311 Million.
Twitter’s lead on Application Services - Raffi Krikorian mde a presentation in March of this year and raised a number of interesting statistics (courtesy of 'Fresh Networks' Hamrid Sirhan).
- The current rate of tweeting is 1,200 Tweets per second (tps)
- There are currently 110 million tweets per day
These two statistics alone highlight the now huge popularity and activity that Twitter has. It has become very trendy amongst celebrities and athletes to promote themselves and anyting hey're invovled in. It has also broken down barriers that were once in place between celebrities and 'regular people'. It's introduced a new level of fan interaction. It has also become a way for businesses to promote thier products, and even for 'twitter celebrities' to emerge, becoming popular simply through thier 140 character tweets.
Trending topics has also become popular, and has enabled tweeters to view other opinions in a matter of seconds regarding big world events and announcements. It has become a perfect example of 'citizen journalism'.
Making 'The United Nations of Twitter'
Much like Facebook, the flag would surely be the logo. But this time maybe not of the word 'Twitter', but of the bird or maybe the 'failwhale' that we see so often.
In terms of the type of government, I think a democracy would work quite well. It would enable everyone to have a voice (nobody can exeed 140 characters in twitter - nobody!). With this Democracy could also come 'Popular Sovereignty', which is based on the idea that a state is 'created by the will and consent of its people'. This is also similairly linked with The Social Contract which comes from philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes. This is the idea that the population would agree to obide common rules and protect each other from harm etc...
This would very much be a united nation. Generally the people i have encountered have been friendly and just happy to express thier views to those that will read them. It is also filled with a diverse mixture of nationalities, age groups, and careers. Thier are doctors, actors, singers, plumbers, presidents, journalists, sales assistants, I'm sure every profession is covered somewhere on twitter.
In part two I will be analysing exactl what would make Twitter a dominant and powerful country.
In my Facebook post, I included a world map which highlighted the popularity of the social networking site. Well here is Twitters own version -
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| Twitter usage across the world |
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