There are now more than 1 million users of Facebook in Malaysia. Friendster said there are 2.2 million active Malaysian users on its social network. Now, what about Twitter? In December 2008, TwitterFacts estimated a total of 3,429 Twitter users in Malaysia. I believe the number has increased since then.

Let’s look elsewhere for hints, clues and indications. WeFollow, a user-generated Twitter Directory by Kevin Rose, where users self-tagged to a set of 3 keywords to describe themselves. There are only 274 users who tagged themselves to ‘malaysia’ but I’m quite sure the figure doesn’t reflect the current total Malaysians on Twitter.

TwitterCounter and Twitter Grader directories also offer listing of Twitter users by country. Unfortunately, Grader only list Top 50 users whereas TwitterCounter limits its listing to 10,020 profiles, per location. TwitterCounter says it is tracking 3.9 million unique Twitter users and yes, a search of ‘malaysia’ returns 10,020 Twitter usernames.

There are two ‘live’ directories, which are indexing Twitter users – TwitDir and Twellow. At the time of this posting, TwitDir has a total of 4,013,391 accounts and 2,231 of them with ‘Malaysia’ within their location detail. Twellow called itself Twitter Yellow Pages and it categorizes Twitter users into various categories, based on bio details. Currently, there are a total of 6.6 million Twitter profiles in its database. At the time of this posting, a search of ‘malaysia’ yields a total of 7,766 accounts.

Take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes

Based on TwitDir directory, the percentage of Twitter users from Malaysia is 0.055589%. On Twellow, the percentage is roughly 0.117667%. The average of these two percentages is 0.086628%, which, for the sake of this attempt to estimate the number of Twitter users in Malaysia, constitutes the percentage of Malaysian users in Twitterville. For some unfathomable reason, that percentage of remains constant from now until 2013 (beyond that, it’s anyone’s bet).

For total Twitter users worldwide from 2009 to 2013, let’s use Twitter’s private-now-public estimates. Twitter defines a user as “unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week.” The following table shows the estimated number of Malaysia Twitter users for the next four years, assuming the percentage of Malaysian within Twitterville remains constant at 0.086628%.

By end of this year, there are more than 20,000 Twitter users in Malaysia. By 2011, the number of users will swell to more than 300,000 and the half-a-million mark will be crossed in 2012. By end of 2013, there will be an estimated total of 866,280 Twitter users in Malaysia.

So, even when Twitter achieved its dream of becoming the first web service with a billion users in 2013, crystal ball says total Malaysia Twitter users will not cross the 1 million user mark (a feat Facebook already achieved in March 2009).

And there you have it. Prognostication or hallucination? Find me on Twitter @zhiQ and do let me know if I should ditch my crystal ball.

My Crystal Ball Says 866,280 Twitter Users in Malaysia by 2013 originally appeared on GreyReview on July 31, 2009.