Is Twitter the new Internet?

In February, I created this graph, which shows the frequency of usage of the terms ‘internet’, ‘web’ and ‘twitter’ in the New York Times from the 1990-2008:

NYTimes: Internet, Web & Twitter

In it, Twitter appears as a small, barely visible scattering of orange bars in the far right corner of the graph. Curious to see how this has changed, I output the same graph (albeit a bit taller) this morning. This time, the time range runs through 2009 until this month:

NYTimes: Internet, Web & Twitter (Twitter rising!)

I’m not surprised to see Twitter make a more impressive appearance – but I am impressed by the speed of its rise. At this rate, it won’t be long until ‘twitter’ catches up to ‘internet’. I wonder when markers will start putting the letter ‘t’ in front of everything?

For more information about how these graphs were created, and how you can explore with the NYTimes Article Search API, read this post.

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2 Comments

  1. Posted July 30, 2009 at 8:48 pm | Permalink

    Twitter is the new CB radio.

  2. Posted July 31, 2009 at 4:04 pm | Permalink

    Twitter is the new ham radio repeater.

4 Trackbacks

  1. By Twitted by blprnt on July 30, 2009 at 4:29 pm

    [...] This post was Twitted by blprnt [...]

  2. By So what about twitter? / CODEISPOETRY on July 31, 2009 at 5:33 am

    [...] twitter the new internet?” Asks Jer Thorp in his latest blogpost. He created some nice graphs. I’m not surprised to see Twitter make a more [...]

  3. [...] “Web” has been favored over “Internet.” (Update | July 31 Jer has posted a newer version on his blog. The recent progress of “Twitter” is [...]

  4. [...] second precedent that we chose is Jer Thorp’s visualization entitled “Is Twitter the New Internet?”. This piece explores the usage of specific terms over time to show the proliferation of internet [...]

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