14 DAY TRIAL // It has been one great year for Twitter with the service seeing huge growth, especially in the first half of the year. It rose from a microblogging service used by the hip, tech-savvy crowd to one used by millions of regular people, as well as the latest trend for celebrities and companies. Lately though, it looks like some of the shine may be fading and traffic numbers have stayed flat since summer. Despite this, cofounder Biz Stone is more confident than ever that the site will continue to grow and that 2010 will see more significant changes for the service, which it now dubs an "information network," and Twitter will become an essential tool for keeping the world updated with the latest news and trends.
In a piece published by the British newspaper The Times and written by Stone, Twitter's cofounder looks back at the past year and at what he sees as the company's promising future. "For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity," he writes.
Stone dwells a lot on the Iran elections during which Twitter really came to be known as an information source being used by people in Iran, as well as those outside of the country, to stream out information about the elections and the ensuing violence acts. At the time, Twitter delayed a scheduled maintenance in order to ensure that the service would be running during day-time in Iran.
The most interesting part, though, is towards the end where Stone estimates that the site will continue to grow and will serve billions of tweets every hour sometime next year. There are now about 1 million to 1.5 million tweets created every hour and about 7 billion tweets in total so far. "In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world," Stone also adds.