Twitterholic is fascinating. It lists the top hundred Twitter users based on # followers, # friends and #updates, and gets updated a few times a day.
Who has the most followers? Surprise - Barack Obama, followed largely by prolific members of the tech/startup/social media world with a few news outlets and wildcards such as Darth Vader. It would be interesting to find out if this popularity is due to actual value of tweets (entertainment or professional), or fame, or some other metric.
Who has the most friends? Again, Obama takes the lead. The #friends on the list ranges from 85,000 to about 5300, which begs the question - how can you possibly follow that many tweets? To an individual user, it seems the point of diminishing returns might come well before those numbers. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a different kind of value in this volume, such as for analytics or research purposes.
Who tweets the most? Less surprisingly, this list is dominated by news and radio outlets. However, the location range is MUCH broader than in the first two lists, where the majority listed were from the US. In this list, users come from all over the world - Japan, Spain, Venezuela, Lebanon.
There’s all sorts of interesting analysis that can be done here. A number of sites already exist that slice and dice the usage in various ways - summed up nicely in this blog post from Flowing Data. The most personally useful is probably Tweetstats, which graphs activity in realtime on any Twitter user.
Of course, Google Trends provides great overall usage stats as well.
