Twitter, at 5, sends 1 bn tweets a week!

BANGALORE, INDIA: March 21, 2006, a young man called Jack Dorsey posted a message on his website, Twitter, which had only two words in 18 characters! And the message read 'inviting coworkers'. In the days to come it was re-tweeted 100 times heralding the era of microblogging revolution.

Yes, Twitter is now a five years old ...ready for kindergarten!!!..

Twitter began the service on March 13, 2006, according to reports. It now boasts of over 200 million users, who, on an average, send more than 140 million tweets each day. A year back it was 50 million a day. The total users of the microblogging site amounts to almost 10 per cent of Internet users globally.

Interestingly, according to a Twitter blog it took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day for the microblogging site to reach the billionth tweet mark. And now it takes just one week to send a billion tweets as the user base has gone up like anything.

Now, Twitter has become an endlessly flowing river of news, opinion, information, expertise, contacts, data, links, connections. The scenario is like that no news is news if it is not on Twitter.

40% tweets originate on mobile devices

According to the Twitter blog, 40 per cent of tweets originate on a mobile device, which shows an increase of 182 per cent over the past year. Also, the tweeting little giant adds more than 460,000 new account every day. 572,000 new accounts created were created on March 12, 2011.

The highest record of tweets was broken in Japan four seconds after midnight on New Year’s Day 2011, when 6,939 tweets were sent in one second. When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, the news spread like wildfire on Twitter at a rate of 456 tweets per second, which was a record at that time.

And behind all these huge numbers, there is small number too! As on March 14, 2011, the microblogging sensation has only 400 employees. Of course a great leap compared to the 8 workers it had in January 2008!