Jul 16, 2011 10:51 GMT  ·  By

Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday, again. While the first ever tweet was sent out a few months before that, the site went public on July 15, 2006. At the time it was called Twttr and was a micro-blogging via SMS service that also had an online component.

On its launch day, there were 224 tweets. Now, Twitter is getting just as many in a tenth of a second. The record is 6,939 tweets per second on New Year's Day this year in Japan.

In fact, Twitter is now 'delivering' 350 billion tweets every day, quite a lot of activity. The company also revealed that it got 600,000 new registrations for the site the previous day, as many as in the first 16 months of Twitter.

All of these numbers sound great, but do they mean anything? Well, like with the Google+ numbers revealed by CEO Larry Page, the devil is in the details.

For example, Twitter is saying that 350 billion tweets are delivered each day, not that these many are shared by users. Similarly, Google+'s 1 billion items "shared and received" means all of the activity on the site, not the number of items being published by users.

TechCrunch has done an interesting comparison with Facebook's recently revealed numbers, 4 billion items shared each day, this means status updates, photos, links and so on. Twitter actually sees 1 billion tweets sent out each week.

But the figure looks so small because this is the actual number of things shared by people, all of these are then delivered to countless more users. Facebook, with 750 million users, probably has numbers when it comes to shared items reaching all the users, that would dwarf Twitter, not to mention Google+.

Still, Twitter is clearly seeing a lot of activity and it's not going anywhere any time soon. Google+ can become a competitor, with its similar follower model, but it has too many features that take away from the core experience to be a true alternative to Twitter.