This week marks Twitter’s fifth birthday. Since it was first launched to the public, the micro-blogging service has noticeably changed the way we broadcast, organise and digest information. The ubiquitous “tweets” now infest many aspects of day to day life, be it website promotion, fact-finding or even 24 hour rolling news.
When Japan was struck by a huge earthquake last week, it was Twitter that sent the news whizzing around the world, and since the event itself, it has been Twitter that has been used to disseminate further breaking news on the ground, such as the catastrophic impact of the ensuing tsunami, or the still-evolving situation at the Fukishima Nuclear Power Plant.
To mark the anniversary, Twitter’s Carolyn Penner has published a blog post with some historical – and current – numbers.
The most striking are the tweet count milestones. From launch, it took Twitter three years, two months and one day to reach one billion tweets, however now a billion tweets are created every week – that’s an average of around 1,650 tweets per second, or TPS in Twitter-speak.
Speaking of TPS, when Michael Jackson died in 2009 an at-that-time record TPS was recorded of 456, however the current TPS record was from Japan over New Years – a massive 6,939. Overall the average number of Tweets sent per day has almost tripled in the space of one year.
Twitter also reveal that they now have a staff of 400, and are signing up on average 460,000 new accounts every day. Although these two facts are impressive, they are both pertinent in light of some of the troubles Twitter is facing. The amount of spam clogging up the service is on the rise – yesterday I became the inadvertent target of a fleet of spam accounts, who sent me no less than 50 messages in the space of about six minutes. As such it’s impossible to know how many signups are legitimate, and how many are spammers. Twitter say they are actively improving their anti-spam measures, however we’ve yet to see noticeable change.
The other stumbling block for the social network is that for a company of 400 people, it still has very little in the way of a business plan. Try as they might, Twitter just don’t seem to be able to monetize all those users. The company has made some steps towards profitability with promoted tweets and trends, however they’re still a long way off turning anything near a profit.
With that said, Happy Birthday Twitter – and many happy retweets!
