Twitter Celebrates Fifth Birthday, Tweets Impressive Stats

By Eryn Sun, Christian Post Reporter Friday, July 15, 2011

Now registering over 200 million tweets a day, Twitter celebrated its fifth anniversary on Friday.

The website, based in San Francisco, was produced in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and officially launched on July 15, 2006 – five years ago today.

Ranked as one of the most visited websites worldwide, the fastest growing information network tweeted a few noteworthy statistics to commemorate the occasion.

“There were 224 Tweets sent on July 15, 2006. Today, users send that many Tweets in less than a tenth of a second.”

Adding more impressive numbers, the company shared, “Yesterday, we saw more than 600,000 signups. It took us more than *16 months* to reach the first 600,000 Twitter accounts.”

Additionally, to get to its first billionth tweet, it took three years, two months and one day.

And now? Users are sending one billion tweets every five days.

“For perspective,” the company blogged, “every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace.’”

“Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of ‘War and Peace’ would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.”

Adding to the celebrations, Twitter also currently has one million registered apps, which was created by more than 750,000 developers around the world. A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds.

The microblogging network, which allows users to post up to 140 characters, is surely changing the face of online communication – where keeping things short and simple is key.

What else is it changing? Lives, apparently.

“Using Twitter helped a homeless man reunite with his daughter, sent two Cincinnati Reds fans to spring training on a player’s dime, and even helped residents of a small city in Korea find fresh water after its supply was cut off,” the company revealed.

“Whether across the world or across the street, Twitter – and more broadly, technology – allows people to view the world through each other’s eyes. As a result, we are able to share information and communicate more easily than any time in our past, bringing the world closer.”