As bizarre as the number suggests, Twitter has reached 50 million tweets a day, in comparison to the measly figure of 5000 tweets a day since its presence on the web in the year 2007. To put it mildly, this explosion in its number of users and these astounding stats is taking Twitter places since last year only further cementing its place as the ‘SMS of the Internet’.
For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking site that is free of cost to sign up with, that allows its users to send and read messages known as tweets that are of no more than 140 characters of length, and is delivered to the user’s subscribers also known as his/ her followers. Its content is divided into sections such as News, Spam, Self-promotion, Pointless babble, Conversational and Pass-along value, of which ‘pointless babble’ heads the list with 40.5 of messages sent.
Perhaps the reason for its uninhibited success as of today can be attributed to the intent of its service as described by its CEO, Evan Williams, “What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest and most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it’s not a social network, but it’s an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.”
Regardless of reports that Twitter only manages to retain 40 % of its total users, as well as predictions that it will reach only 10 % of Internet users, its current figures of 600 tweets per second is staggering enough to conclude that it is indeed in the top 50 most accessed sites on the Internet.