(and counting)
While the micro-blogging site Twitter won’t continue to gain in popularity forever, it has certainly shown us that a site can become big. And I mean BIG. How big? Well, the 10 billionth tweet has been posted by an anonymous user who protected his tweets. To keep track of how many tweets have been posted, I recommend you use GigaTweet. It isn’t exact, it only predicts how many tweets there are based on the current amount of tweets being posted, and Twitter have played around with the tweet numbers a few times.
The 5 billionth tweet was posted by Robert Sloan. It was an @ reply to another user and read “oh lord”. It is important to know that this tweet was only posted in October 2009, and the next 5 billion tweets were posted much quicker than the first 5 billion tweets. Twitter has enjoyed a burst of popularity in the last year or so, but how long will Twitter continue to grow? Will it be taken over by spammers? Will the users simply leave? Here are some recent analytic graphs on the amount of tweets (by gigatweet):
Co-founder Biz Stone recently posted a newsletter to email update subscribers. It said, among some other things, that twitter had reached 140 employees, that registered twitter accounts have grown 1500% and that the twitter team has grown 500%, plus the developers of the hundreds of different mobile and desktop twitter clients. He is obviously happy at the great things a once tiny start-up has achieved, but sounds like he is expecting even more in the future. How long do YOU think Twitter will continue to grow?