Twitter’s depiction of tweets.
(Credit: Twitter)
It is a micro-blogging site yet its figures are of a macro size. Twitter in its blog post on Thursday said, “Halfway through 2011, users on Twitter are now sending 200 million Tweets per day.” Juxtapose this with the 2 million tweets that were sent per day in 2009 or the 65 million per day in 2010. Amazing climb, isn’t it?
To put it in perspective, 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 these 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.
On the occasion, Techland Time posts, “At its worst, it (Twitter) peddles fat burning pills and becomes a dispensary for dong shots; but at its best, it is an open channel for discourse and teaching, even occasionally becoming a tool for mobilizing movements.”
Cnet posted, “Twitter’s growth over the years has been strong even through difficult times. During its especially swift growth in 2009, the site’s users were welcomed by the Fail-Whale–an image that displayed when the site was down–far more often than they would have liked. But the whale never stopped people from coming back, and over the past year in particular, the site has been far more stable.”
A billion Tweets are sent every five days. What’s in them? Everything about every topic imaginable – whether it’s a unique bird’s-eye view of the Shuttle launch as seen from an airplane window or cheers of support for soccer teams in this year’s Champions League tournament. 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.
Twitter also looked at the most-popular topics on its site during the first six months of the year. According to Twitter, pop singer Rebecca Black was the top topic in pop culture so far this year, followed by Britney Spears’ album “Femme Fatale,” and Charlie Sheen. Swine Flu, Hosni Mubarak, and Easter were the top world-events topics on the site.
However, Twitter is still far behind Facebook. According to Facebook’s official figures, the site has more than 500 million active users who each month share over 30 billion pieces of content, including links, blog posts, and photo albums. There are even reports that Facebook has topped 750 million members.
When Twitter launched in 2006, few would have imagined that it would turn into this monstrous cloud of information in a matter of 5 years.