14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday. Back in 2006, a small number of people got together to make a group SMS service which they dubbed TWTTR. Several days later, on March 21, the first ever tweet was sent. Since then, the service has grown at a huge rate and continues to do so.
Twitter provided some interesting stats, showcasing this exponential growth, though the numbers most people would be interesting in, the ones that are the most speculative, of course, like its number of active users, have not been revealed.
"Five years ago this week, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter," Twitter wrote.
"On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet.Today, on every measure of growth and engagement, Twitter is growing at a record pace," it added.
Perhaps the most impressive numbers have to do with the sheer volume of tweets. It took the service, or rather its users, three years, two months and one day to send one billion tweets.
Now, one billion tweets are sent each week, and the number is still growing. Only a year ago, 50 million tweets were sent each hour, on average. Now that number is 140 million and much higher on some days.
Big events spur huge activity bursts. The day Michael Jackson, in 2009, the web saw some of the biggest traffic surges in history. At the time, 456 tweets per second were sent. The current record, set just after midnight on New Year's in Japan stands at 6,939 tweets every second.
While it's not seeing the type of growth spurs it got a couple of years ago, many people are still joining Twitter now. In fact, Twitter says 572,000 accounts were created on March 12 alone.
Of course, Twitter is not saying how many of those new users keep coming back. And it's not saying how many people use the service each month. But that may be difficult to measure, considering the way Twitter has permeated other services and distribution channels.