Globally connected: explosive relationships. On Twitter

The inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners Lee, has joined Twitter (Tim Berners Lee on Twitter) on October 22nd 2009, 15:29 CET

His entering on Twitter will show how connected this world is: currently he has 5,000 followers, and word's spreading like a virus that he has joined. Currently Twitter Search shows a bit under a tweet per minute that tweeps are announcing his arrival

Twitter Counter tries to do a job at predicting, but its information is way too old to do good predicting



My prediction is that these numbers will multiply like crazy, following something like Moore's law, but then just on Twitter - it might turn out to be called Twitter's law in a few days, when it turns out that every 12 hours the number of his followers will double, which will probably last for a few days (until next Wednesday)

Why 12 hours? Dunno really, just a hunch. I'm online 12 hours a day, tweeting to people all over the world in different timezones. On an 8-hour day, everyone of us will witness people going to sleep or just waking up, and pass on the message

Repetition is how we learned what we were taught. It is the multiplication of people tweeting about Tim that will drive the explosive growth of his number of followers (next to the fact that he's a modern techy icon)

Weekend's started for all Europeans, US still has 4 to 7 hours to go. Weekend will be slow, maybe just an increase of factor 1 or even less per 12 hours. I predict, according to my own "Martijn's law", that he'll have 100K followers by next Monday. That will be the time to pick up again: I expect Tim to have 3 million followers next Wednesday afternoon

Well, so much for just an intermediary blog post. Comments welcome as usual!