Happy Tweetday: Some facts about Twitter
As Twitter gears up to celebrate its fifth birthday this week, here are a few facts about the microblogging site everyone should know.
In a blog, Twitter has highlighted a few facts about the site, which informs readers that it was five years ago this week that ‘a small team of people started working on a prototype’ of Twitter.
Here are some of the facts from that blog:
The company started with eight members of staff, growing to 29 by January 2009. By Jan 2010 Twitter had 130 members of staff, which more than doubled by January 2011 to 350. Now, in March 2011, it employs around 400 members of staff, a figure that continues to grow.
The first tweet was sent by Jack Dorsey (@jack) on March 21 2006, and it took three years, two months and one day for the number of tweets sent to reach 1 billion.
According to the blog it now takes a week to send 1 billion tweets.
Other facts revealed through the blog are that the average number of Tweets sent per day in the last month are 140 million, growing from an average of 50 million a year ago.
On 11 March 2011, 177 million Tweets were sent out, while on 12 March 2011, 572,000 new accounts were created on the site. Aparently 460,000 new account were created on average, each day last month, with an increase of 182 per cent in Twitter mobile users over the last year.
Following the death of Michael Jackson on 25 June 2009, 456 tweets per second were sent.