I recently noticed that I had posted my 1,000th tweet on twitter, since I started on January 22nd. That is 1,000 tweets in 92 days, or an average of just under 11 tweets per day.

And when I remarked that I had posted my 1,000th tweet, @scrumph remarked that he had reached the similar milestone of 559 tweets, and wondered how many of my tweets were automated.

I didn’t know. I guessed at about 50. But then I started wondering about all the rest of it, so decided to go through my first 1,000 tweets and break them down into different categories, and see how they shaped up. One important thing to note is that some of them (and you’ll see why when you see the categories) fell into more than one category, and so if you add them all up, you’ll find a total of over 1,000.

Anyway, here goes…

Replies

There were 543 of these, for a score of 54.3%. I’m not going to do the rest in percentages, because the figure is out of a thousand, so if you want to word out percentages, just divide the number of tweets by ten.

Note also that ‘reply’ is a slight misnomer. It is frequently a reply to a tweet someone else has made, but it can also be a way of specifically targeting a tweet at someone (or more than one person, if more than one of you are in the conversation). You get the opportunity to view replies specifically made to you, even if the person receiving the ‘reply’ does not follow the sender, so this is the only way to pass messages onto someone who isn’t following you.

Posts containing URLs

There were 209 of these. I’m not counting URLs added by twitter (e.g. of person’s name type such as @thepickards, just ones specifically intended to provide a link to something else…

‘Replies’ to celebrity-type or otherwise ‘famous’ people who have probably not got the faintest idea who I am, only I happen to follow them and wanted to comment on something they had said

83. Most of which were sent to @glinner, although other celebrities were represented as well. I have to also give a nice mention to Jonathan Ross (@wossy), Graham Linehan, and Krishnan Guru-Murthy (@krishgm) as they have been nice enough to reply back on occasion.

It’s a little bit sad really, that while I don’t really buy into the celebrity culture (by which I mean ‘Heat magazine and all that stuff…’), I still feel chuffed when, after I commented on Eminem being due to appear on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, he commented back.

Don’t get me wrong, it was nice of him to comment back (particularly as with 200,000+ followers and 3,000+ people being followed by him, it must be impossible to keep track of all of the tweets being sent to him), and it made me feel pleased that I had maybe entertained him for a moment after I have been entertained by him enough in the past, but I was also slightly disappointed at feeling pleased at having my comment responded to; because it implies that I must buy into the celebrity ‘culture’ to some degree otherwise I wouldn’t feel pleased at having my thoughts ‘validated’ by being read by a celebrity…

Or maybe in having different expectations of Jonathan Ross, as a ’sleb’, I’m doing the same thing here, as it’s nice when anyone responds…

Automated tweets (blog updates)

79. These are the tweets which get sent whenever I update this blog (and also update Facebook).

Sport

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Not just one sport, the 71 tweets in this category have covered cricket, football, motor racing, tennis, and no doubt will cover even more in future…

Utter, utter banality

This category is where all the ‘I’m a bit bored’ or ‘am going to bed now’ tweets end up. It’s the category that most people who don’t ‘get’ twitter think that twitter is all about — people talking about what they had for breakfast. We should try and cut these ones down to a minimum: certainly less than the 61 I found on my twitterstream. Here’s a classic example of mine.

TV programmes

46 of these. This only really tends to get interesting if you’re following a conversation about the particular program you are watching, at the same time as watching it. Yes, that’s obviously remarkably geeky, but it can be fun.

Beer

…appeared in 37 tweets, the majority of which were found in my live tweeting of what I was drinking at the Newcastle Beer Festival.

Re-tweets

For those of you not on twitter, this is when you republish what someone else has tweeted (crediting them appropriately), circulating their message to a slightly different audience, because you think their message is worth reading. Sometimes messages can be retweeted several times. I produced 22 retweets.

Jokes and Funnies

16, including a few April Fools references.

Stuff relating to spams, phishers, hackers, and ‘if I follow you will you follow me back’ fodder

Eleven

Accidentally replying to myself instead of the person I actually meant to reply to

Just the once.

None of the above categories

Fifty-eight

Of course, these is all my subjective categorisation, someone else might have categorised more (or less) as truly banal, for example…