Meteoric Twitter serving a billion tweets every week

by Steven Mostyn - Mar 16 2011, 11:07

Twitter is extremely popular. You know it. We know it. Another news story reiterating that fact perhaps isn’t necessary. That being said, certain major milestones should still be highlighted…

So, shamelessly pulling on our favourite ‘We Heart Twitter’ baseball caps, allow us to reveal that Twitter is not only celebrating its fifth anniversary this week, it’s also currently handling a billion tweets per week.

That’s according to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has marked the microblogging service’s birthday by announcing his intention to reveal a selection of intriguing titbits of information regarding the network.

“I’ve been digging through all my drawings, emails, & notes from around that time [when Twitter launched],” he said in a tweet. “I’ll share them over the next 2 weeks right here on #twttr.”

In better assessing Twitter’s meteoric rise to prominence in the social networking space, the service required three years, two months and one day to serve up its first billion tweets, which is a far cry from its current breathtaking momentum.

Taking a closer look at Twitter’s raw figures, last month it registered an average of 460 million new user accounts every day, peaking on March 12 with 572,000 new users.

Meanwhile, a year ago, the average number of tweets sent each day stood at 50 million—a figure that now stands at around 143 million tweets per day.

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