With the fifth anniversary of the launch of Twitter on March 21 fast approaching, the social networking site has released a few statistics to illustrate the site's phenomenal growth.
In a blog post, Twitter's Carolyn Penner said Twitter was, ''on every measure of growth and engagement'', growing at ''a record pace''. Her claim was backed up with selected statistics that show just how far the Twitter has come since CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey penned his first tweet. Here's just a few:
It took Twitter three years, two months and one day to hit one billion tweets. That same amount is now sent each week.
The number of average tweets people send per day has also skyrocketed, from 50 million one year ago to 140 million in the last month. On March 11 alone, 177 million tweets were sent.
The current tweets per second record stands at 6,939, set four seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year's Day (presumably Ms Penner is referring to New Year's 2010/11). Tweets per second hit 456 following the death of Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009.
Accounts statistics were similarly impressive, with 572,000 new accounts created on March 12 alone and an average of 460,000 new accounts per day over the last month. Twitter is also seeing massive growth in mobile users similar to Facebook, with an 182 per cent increase in mobile users over the past year. Facebook claims that more than 200 million active access their site through mobile devices.
The figures came just days after Twitter moved to shore up control of its platform, telling developers to stop copying official Twitter apps and focus on creative ways of integrating the service into other products.
