Every hack authoring an article and every flack penning a proposal has encountered The Question: how many users does this social network have? Sure, you can Google the answers, but then you run into the problem of making sure that your source is authoritative, current, and doesn’t confuse active users (those who log in at least once a month) with total users (your grandmother, who, after signing up, gave up).
Here, then, a new offering from Tech Cocktail: a continuously updated Google Doc that lists the number of active users for the big social networks (see the embedded spreadsheet above or click here).
While Jeremiah Owyang did something similar last year, no one seems to collect these data on a regular basis, and the Wikipedia article on the subject is outdated.
Admittedly, the spreadsheet is incomplete—no StumbleUpon, no Tumblr, no Wikipedia—but that’s where part two of this project comes in: we’re hoping that Tech Cocktailers will tip us to missing, and newer, stats.
So, leave a link in the comments and help us to help data fiends everywhere.
And don’t forget to bookmark the chart for future reference.
A version of this blog post appeared on Tech Cocktail on October 21, 2011.
