Why learn about growth models?
The following essay is adapted from blog posts on emergent math by Geoff Krall.
Can You Predict How Many Followers @charliesheen Has Right Now?
Sometime on March 1, 2011, Charlie Sheen joined twitter at the suggestion of Piers Morgan, who is apparently some type of person. By the time I was alerted of the existence of a @charliesheen twitter feed, it was 4:04 PM Mountain Standard Time. Sheen had yet to tweet, but already had somehow amassed over 100,000 followers. He hadn’t even put up an avatar of himself yet (and somehow the account was “verified”).
What happened over the next several hours was nothing short of amazing. All you had to do was wait a few seconds or minutes and hit “refresh,” and just watch the number of followers climb.
I did this for about 50 minutes and collected data along the way.
Time on March 1, 2011 | # of Followers |
---|---|
4:04 PM | 109,099 |
4:07 PM | 112,497 |
4:09 PM | 116,143 |
4:12 PM | 120,195 |
4:14 PM | 122,901 |
4:18 PM | 127,643 |
4:21 PM | 129,793 |
4:24 PM | 133,357 |
4:29 PM | 140,215 |
4:32 PM | 144,103 |
4:38 PM | 149,528 |
4:44 PM | 153,848 |
Later that night, I refreshed every half-hour or so and watched the number climbing steadily. At this point, he had made his first tweet.
Time on March 1, 2011 | # of Followers |
---|---|
6:21 PM | 261,894 |
6:24 PM | 275,638 |
6:49 PM | 302,077 |
7:13 PM | 324,595 |
7:38 PM | 348,955 |
8:45 PM | 429,904 |
Eventually I had to go to bed. So I did. And as soon as I woke up the next morning I went back to check Charlie Sheen’s number of twitter followers.
Now I’d be checking every hour or so. Recorded here.
Time on March 2, 2011 | # of Followers |
---|---|
6:45 AM | 729,703 |
8:51 AM | 799,008 |
9:36 AM | 820,538 |
10:23 AM | 841,940 |
11:16 AM | 865,972 |
12:43 PM | 902,291 |
1:47 PM | 926,557 |
3:09 PM | 957,259 |
The last datum I recorded was at 3:09 MST, at which point @charliesheen had 957,259 followers. So in less than 24 hours, Charlie Sheen had gained 800,000 followers on twitter.
I have two questions for you:
- At what time March, 1, did Charlie Sheen join twitter? and,
- How many followers does he have right now?
To answer, I’ll break this up into a few different time pieces. Here’s the plot of Charlie Sheen’s followers as I have them, only for 3/1/2011, the day he joined twitter.
Not only is that a linear fit, it’s very linear (R-squared of 0.9995). I’m also shocked at how straight that line is. That is, there are not spikes of activity. I would have thought that in the evening, when everyone’s sitting in front of their TVs with their iPad 2’s there would be a marked increase in @charliesheen twitter followers.
Now let’s look at the same graph, but with all of Day 2 (3/2/2011) data included.
Unfortunately, I didn’t check Sheen’s twitter followers in the middle of the night, but it appears to have leveled off slightly going into Day 2 of the twitter account.
Now, I’m not 100% sure when the twitter feed account went live – in fact, that was one of the questions I asked last time – but I do have this: