Happy Fifth Birthday Twitter!

According to the Twitter blog, this week sees in their fifth birthday and it was this time in 2006 when a small team of people started working on a prototype of the microblogging service. It was in fact March 21, 2006, when Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet, and since then the site has continued to rocket to the Twitter we know today.

There have been some staggering figures in these first five years since the creation of Twitter, however I have included the stats from the original post which I think say it all.

The interesting thing from my point of view will be where Twitter goes next, and whether it can maintain this success or whether it has reached it's natural peak. With the recent introduction of various ways of monetising the service, with marketing options such as promoted tweets, and promoted trends, I do believe there are a few tricks left up the sleeve of the Twitter folk yet. I'd be interested to know what you think, and how you think Twitter will expand on the success of the first five years?

#tweets
3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.

1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.

50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.

140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.

177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.

456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).

6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts
572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.

460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.

182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

#employees
8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.



Pic - Twitter Birthday Cake