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NewNewTwitterLogoOn the night of December 8th, I didn't get the New Twitter. Instead of refreshing my Twitter profile repeatedly or complaining (on Twitter), I set up a Radian6 Topic Profile and started tracking the conversation.

Around 9 am on December 8th news of the New Twitter launch started to spread. A few hours later, thousands started getting their hands on Twitter's revamped iPhone and Android apps, and eventually the web version. Activity spiked at from 2 - 3 PM on December 8th:

New Twitter - 12.8 - 12.10 Volume

In total, there were almost 360k conversations about the Twitter redesign on December 8th. Conversation volume decreased to 285k on the 9th, and decreased again on the 10th to 100k. Volume has continued to level off since launch as expected, but is still averaging almost 30k daily conversations. 

I was also curious about sentiment. Are people loving the New Twitter, or do they hate it? During the first 72 hours of the launch, the ratio of positive to negative posts look about even except for a significant spike in negative sentiment from 2 - 3 PM on December 8th.

New Twitter Sentiment

My initial thought was that this was a knee jerk reaction for many users. This was the time period where many users were first exposed to the web version of the Twitter redesign. We should all know from experience that when big interface changes are dropped on users of popular web applications, reactions tend to veer more in the direction of hate than love. See Facebook and Techcrunch for examples. After doing some digging however, I discovered that the spike in negative sentiment was actually caused by one of most powerful forces on the internet: Justin Bieber. Here is Bieber's tweet at 2:19 pm:

From 2 - 3 PM this got retweeted 4,724 times, or 53.5% of negative tweets during this hour. Without Bieber's Tweet, sentiment would have been much closer to the general 50/50 trend. 

The use of hashtags during this event revealed another another interesting trend. This isn't Twitter's first redesign, soTwitter users were already familiar with the #NewTwitter hashtag. For this redesign though, there was a lot of buzz around the #NewNewTwitter hashtag. What's interesting is how little #NewNewTwitter was used in conversations compared to #NewTwitter.

Newtwitter vs newnewtwitter

I fully expected #NewTwitter to be used more often than #NewNewTwitter, awareness is obviously much higher. Given the press around the Twitter launch though, I just didn't expect the delta to be 10x. This is solid evidence that established hashtags have a higher chance of getting picked up, and language used in mainstream press and blogs isn't necessarily the same language average people will use in their social conversations. 

If anyone is interested in other data points, feel free to post questions in the comments.