I find Twitter’s global appeal is truly amazing. Just a few minutes of watching Twittervision/GeoTwitter and searching for terms on Twitterment will prove its popularity. The map below shows the distribution of Twitter users across the world.

This map was generated by using the Tweets (Twitter posts) aggregated by Twitterment from Twitter public timeline API. It consisted of over 300K Tweets from 35K users. Not all users specify their location, but from the 19K who do - we were able to resolve the geolocation for about 11K users (using Google API). Shown on the right are the top 10 Cities for Twitter usage.
Some interesting points:

• As Steve Rubel recently observed, Twitter seems to be quite popular on the East coast.
• US, Europe and Japan are places where most tweets come from. Japan being the hotbed for new Cell phone/SMS technology, has been very quick at adopting Twitter.
• By offering multilingual support and local SMS short codes (40404 numbers) Twitter might be able to do better in markets like India and China which already have a significant high SMS adoption.

Another interesting example of language analysis in twitter was posted by Bruno Peters. Variations of a term’s popularity can be applied to derive market intelligence for a given demographic. Sudden occurrences of concepts (like “Mexico earthquake“) are potential indicators of trends and geographically specific events.

Also, check out Matt Hurst’s analysis of popularity of the term “Twitter”. It is finally Twitter’s users who are making it popular by evangelizing and getting their friends across the world to join in!

PS: Thanks everyone for your comments and Tweets on Twitterment. More updates shortly.