How Active is Twitter Now? Tweespeed

As of Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 1:10PM PST Twitter is pumping out 13,574 tweets per minute. I know from TweeSpeed, The Twitter Instant Speed Meter. The auto-refreshing application averages the last five minutes of Twitter's public timeline to get its figure.

The simple app was built using "Java (JSP), uses the Twitter Java API, and runs on Google App Engine, Ajax, Sitemesh for page decoration,Eclipse as dev tool, Google Visualization API Gauge."

So why is Tweespeed important? Twitter's activity is a reflection of people's reaction and excitement about news. The above graph shows the TweeSpeed over the past 24 hours. The spike is during Michael Jackson's death. That spike is almost double the current tweespeed. If you're in the news business getting an alert when the Tweespeed shoots through the roof could be valuable. TweeSpeed hasn't implemented alerts, but they do have a widget if you want TweeSpeed on your internet dashboard.

(via Programmableweb)