Five years ago, a small but dedicated team began work on the service that would become Twitter. The fledgling platform was ready for its first tweet on March 21, after eight days of programming, according to Twitter creator and co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Since then, Twitter has grown by leaps and bounds. The Twitter Blog outlined the service's achievements on March 14 in a blog post titled "#numbers."
According to the post, Twitter was up and functioning for 3 years, 2 months and 1 day before it notched its one-billionth tweet. Now, the service handles a billion tweets every week.
In the past year alone, the average number of tweets per day has nearly tripled from 50 million to 140 million.
Tweets generally spike during a significant cultural event, and recent figures have been staggering. On March 11, the day of the Japan earthquake and tsunami, Twitter users exceeded the average daily tweets by 37 million--that's 177 million tweets in a single day.
Also surging is Twitter's membership. 572,000 new accounts were created on March 12. For the past month, the average daily sign-up rate has been 460,000 new accounts, and Twitter has also marked a 182% increase in the number of users tweeting from mobile devices in the past year.
As the the number of tweeters has exploded, the service's staff has been expanding, too. Twitter's initial team consisted of eight members. On March 14, 2011 the staff numbered exactly 400.
To view some more amazing Twitter stats, visit the Twitter Blog. The very first tweet, sent by Jack Dorsey in 2006, can be viewed below.
inviting coworkers
jack