Los Angeles — Twitter is catching up to McDonald’s–billions and billions of tweets. The micro-blogging site announced that a graphic designer based in Tokyo, Japan has just accomplished a fairly significant milestone on Twitter — posting the service’s 20-billionth message since the site’s inception in July of 2006, according to tracking service GigaTweet.
20 billionth tweeter GGGGGGo_Lets_Go. Photograph: Twitter
The exact meaning of the landmark tweet on Saturday by a graphic designer in Tokyo is a bit difficult to translate exactly what user “GGGGGGo_Lets_Go” means as it was part of a larger conversation in the official tweet. However, his translated response to the news is far clearer:
The graphic maestro from Tokyo described his ‘tweet’ as part of a discussion between him and someone else about a third party. But moments later he was flooded with congratulations from Twitter users across the world.
“It looks like I published the 20 billionth tweet. I’m getting hoard of responses from people all around the globe. It is scary. What are the chances? Maybe I’m going to die. Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke,” he said in a statement.
GGGGGGo_Lets_Go Tweeted, “I’m grateful and humbled by those who are visiting because of my 20 billionth tweet. Be warned, I tweet a lot about baseball.”
The landmark accomplishment comes barely two months since the service attained 15 billion tweets and about five months ago it reached 10 billion, suggesting that activity levels on the microblogging service continue to accelerate. While GigaTweet’s count is unofficial, Twitter earlier this year revealed that they are seeing more than 50 million tweets per day. With the company recently breaking its own activity records during the World Cup, we imagine the numbers are fairly accurate.
Twitter’s popularity in Japan has been soaring exponentially. Just around the past year with the company roughly calculated that the Japanese send about 12% of all tweets worldwide, second only to the US. Since mid April, there were 105 million registered users, but approximately 300,000 new users register every day.
One reason for this upswing is that it is possible to say much more in Japanese than in English within Twitter’s 140 character limit. Twitter activity reached an all time high of 3,283 tweets per second during the Japan-Denmark game in this year’s World Cup.
However, with burgeoning traffic and usage levels comes great potential for slowdowns and instability — a major criticism of Twitter has been its “fail whale,” or the iconic imagery frequently associated with one’s inability to log into the service, update a status, or engage with Twitter in any capacity. To that end, Twitter’s initiated plans to transfer its operations into a new, custom-built data center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
As well, reads the Twitter blog, “Making sure Twitter is a dependable platform and a reliable service is our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this effort, and we have moved resources from other important projects to focus on the issue.”