And the number is growing at an accelerated pace

May 31, 2010 14:52 GMT  ·  By

One of the recurrent stories of the latter half of 2009 was Twitter’s apparent slowdown in growth. The site had added a huge number of new users in spring, but the number stopped growing in the following months. This seemed to indicate that, maybe, its popularity was more based on hype than on actual usefulness. The lack of clear data regarding the site’s users and visitors contributed to that view.

At the beginning of the year, Twitter signaled that the site was growing as always, but would not elaborate with actual numbers or any additional data. It wasn’t until the Twitter Chirp conference that we had any official data on the service’s size. But the wait had not been in vain, Twitter managed to surprise almost everyone when it revealed that it had over 100 million users and that the number was still growing at a solid pace.

But a much more interesting metric, and one Twitter had been trying to focus attention on, is engagement. After all, users aren’t worth much if they don’t take part in the conversation. So, it’s encouraging to know that not only are more people using Twitter, but they’re spending more time on it, or at least contributing more, as well.

As Mashable noted, the tweet ‘counter’ has just passed 15 billion, meaning that people have tweeted more than 15 billion times since the service launched. Each tweet has a unique ID, which, up until recently was assigned in chronological order. The correlation was lost due to the Twitpocalypse, but the numbers are still pretty close.

The first billion tweets were made until November 2008, more than two years after the site launched. A year later the number had reached five billion, with most of them made in the second half of the year. That number doubled a few months ago, when, in early March, the ten-billion-tweet mark was reached. In less than three months, the number has gone up to 15 billion, showing that people are using Twitter like never before.