Image by Mykl Roventine
It’s another homerun for microblogging site Twitter as it hits its 10 billionth tweet this week since CEO Jack Dorsey and company set up operations in 2006. You’ll probably remember that it was only November 2008 when the one billionth tweet was posted and it was five months ago when the five billionth tweet graced the Twitter stream (from San Francisco’s Robin Sloan who apparently now works for Twitter).
This milestone is a clear testament to Twitter’s increasing fame and growing notability not only as a personal status updater but also, to some extent, one of the most popular real-time sources for news and other information online. A research conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in October last year claimed that approximately 19% of Internet users say that they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. The Twitter Blog, on the other hand, posted a study in February where Kevin Weil, a member of the Twitter analytics team, stated that from 2007’s 5,000 tweets per day, the rate has increased to 300,000 in 2008, to 2.5 million in 2009, to the recent count of 50 millions tweets per day. This can be translated to a staggering 600 tweets per second.
That percentage of users, along with the driving force of Twitter’s social networking streak and the influence of celebrity microblogging enthusiasts / unwitting Twitter evangelists Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey are seen to be primarily responsible for driving the growth.
The milestone was tracked by GigaTweet, a Web app that simply displays the number of tweets posted on Twitter by way of a counter in the middle of the page. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams also tweeted that he and the rest of the Twitter team are watching the “big board” waiting for the 10 billionth tweet. The honor went to a tweet posted at around 1:00 am GMT on March 5. Twitter has yet to reveal who owns the Twitter profile or what the 10 billionth contained since the owner has set the profile to be a protected stream.
Tags: News, Social Media, social network, Technology, Twitter
