Recently, my number of new Twitter followers has been growing at an increasing rate. I'm not sure if this is simply a factor of the exponential growth of Twitter itself, or perhaps something to do with the fact that I've been talking about Twitter a lot more in email, phone conversations and at events. Probably some combination of these things.

Interested to see where all these new followers are coming from, I took a quick walk through the last ten days' worth of new followers, checking out their profiles to see who these people were.

It quickly became clear that I could group all of the last few hundred followers into a set of simple categories, as this chart shows:

You probably think I'm joking. I only wish that I were (OK, well maybe a little - but I'm not exaggerating by much).

Twitter is still extraordinarily useful, vibrant, and interesting. It is, as Joe says, a great town square. But it's clearly in danger of being overrun by... well... by all of the above. Meh.

I wonder do they sink —
Winter lawns piled
Heavy under hills of snow?
Springing back level, exhaling
When April brings the thaw.