Twitter Celebrates Its 5th Birthday

Twitter has turned five years old. Precisely five years ago, the first ever tweet was sent by the service's co-creator Jack Dorsey. Now it's a worldwide phenomenon with hundreds of millions of users and involved with events in the most diverse places of the world.

Twitter is celebrating its birthday with a website meant to show those that haven't begun using the site what they've been missing. It showcases several celebrities, institutions, world leaders and so on, that are on Twitter.

Along with the Discover Twitter website, the service got 16 representative Twitterers, from Richard Branson to Snoop Dogg, to highlight why they use the site in a video which shows that Twitter can be at the heart of plenty of activities.

In a blog post, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone remembers the early days as well as showcases how much the site has grown since.

"It's easy to remember working with @jack, @ev, and our tiny team on a project we called Twitter like it was last week. Amazingly, it's five years ago today that the first tweet was sent," Stone writes.

"Over these years, Twitter has matured and made an impact in the areas of social responsibility, politics, sports, media, and more," he adds.

"Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day," he revealed.

While it's easy to criticize Twitter and some of its users' tweets for lacking substance, it's also easy to recognize the ways the site has made an impact on global events and on individual users alike.