This post originally appeared on Adele McAlear’s blog and has been published to the Touchbase Blog with permission.
Just a few days short of its 4th birthday, Twitter marked a milestone of 10 billion tweets at approximately 16:54:11 Pacific Time on Thursday, March 4, 2010.
That makes approximately 6,925,208 tweets for each of the 1,444 days since Twitter was founded on March 21, 2006. Though, we know that most of those tweets have been in the last year. In fact, was only 5 months ago that Twitter celebrated the 5 billionth tweet. Just last month Twitter reported that it was processing 50 million tweets a day. That represents 1.2 billion tweets per month and TechCrunch reported that January 2010 saw 75 million unique visitors to Twitter.
But who made the landmark 10 billionth tweet? I asked my friend @Kosso to check the Twitter API for me to find out. However, the tweet was made from a private account.
“One instance where I can say we should ignore our privacy policy: when big round numbers are involved,” proclaimed Twitter employee Doug Williams (@dougw) after the event.
And although we don’t know who made number 10 billion, congratulations will go to Brazilian Rafaela Marques (@lelamarques) on having number 9,999,999,999.
The Twitter team were excitedly watching the numbers tick over and tweeting up a storm to see if one of their own might be the one to score the 10 billionth. (Number 5 billion was made by @robinsloan, who now works at Twitter, as shown below.)
And then, when the moment came,
they celebrated (with a flurry of Macbooks).
The milestone was anticipated earlier today when TechCrunch ran a story highlighting the event and explained that GigaTweet‘s measurement was not entirely accurate. Even Twitter employee Ryan King (@rk) used tweet number 9,995,692,516 to remark:
But since the start, for those of us who’ve been around Twitter for a while, and those who’ve built businesses on and around the simplicity of 140 characters, it’s a time to cheer on the evolution and success of a service that has changed the way we communicate, changed lives and brought so many of us together.
