Carbon footprint of a Tweet, Energy/Tweet approx 100J, CO2 0.02 grams

Earth2Tech reports on the Energy per Tweet.

How Much Energy Per Tweet?

By Katie Fehrenbacher Apr. 19, 2010, 12:00am PDT 1 Comment

2 0

Every time you send out 140 characters over the social application Twitter, how much energy does that consume? According to some back of the napkin calculations from Raffi Krikorian, a developer for Twitter’s Platform Team, each tweet sent consumes about 90 joules. That means each tweet emits about 0.02 grams of C02 into the atmosphere.

For the roughly 50 million tweets sent on average per day, that’s the equivalent of 1 metric ton of CO2 per day. (1 metric ton of CO2 looks kinda like this).

Raffi Krikorian's passionate talk on energy use of a tweet starts at 2:50 into this video.  It is only 5 minutes long.


Apr 15

From #chirp: Energy / Tweet ≈ 100 J ±  something / Tweet

Last night at Chirp, I gave an Ignite talk entitled "Energy / Tweet".  Taking a few liberties, some assumptions, and running all of Twitter in development mode on my laptop, "energy per tweet" comes out to about 100 J / Tweet.

You can catch me talking (and introduced by @brady) starting at 2:50 in this video:

You can also just get the slides here:

Excuse this comment, but it illustrates the passion Raffi has as at 8:10 he says we can be less of a "planet fucker."

This is the kind of thinking that is going to get people thinking what is the carbon impact of code just like Microsoft posted last week.

eBay understands the energy per listing.  Google understands the energy per search.  Twitter understands the energy per tweet.

Do you have energy consumption for your IT services?

Twitter knows it has to be more energy efficient look at its growth.

The new numbers blow past Pingdom’s stats. Some of the highlights:

- In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day.

- By 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day.

- By 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day.

- Tweet growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009, reaching 35 million tweets per day by the end of the year.

- As of now, Twitter sees 50 million tweets created per day.

Great Job Raffi for waking up your development community on the energy / tweet.