30 Terrific Twitter Facts and Figures

1. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year.
2. Twitter’s origins lie in a “day long brainstorming session” that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food, Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.
3. The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006
4. The original project code name for the service was ‘twttr‘, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by the name of the social media image website ‘Flickr’ and the five-character length of American SMS short codes.
5. The team finally settled on the name ‘twitter‘, which means ‘chirps from birds’ in essence ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’
6. The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event, Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.
7. It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007
8. In 2008 there were only 3 million registered users
9. In 2008 there were only 1.25 million tweets per day
10. Jan 2008  there were only 8 employees
11. In 2009 or 3 years ago  had 8 million registered users
12. In 2011 there are now over 400 employees
13. 75% of Twitter traffic comes from third-party applications
14. 60% of all tweets come from third-party apps
15. There are over 100,000 Twitter applications
16. A Forrester report revealed  that “Twitterers are the connected of the connected, overindexing at all Social Media habits.  For example, Twitterers are three times more likely to be Creators (people who create and share content via blog posts and YouTube) as the general US population” (source Forrester report “Who Flocks to Twitter”)
17. 3 years, 2 months and 1 day…the time it took from the first tweet to the billionth tweet.
18. It now takes one week for users to send a billion Tweets.
19. In March 2010 the average number of tweets people sent per week was the the 350 million.
20. 140 million is the average number of tweets people sent per day in February 2011
21. 177 million tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
22. When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 there were 456 tweets per second (TPS)…a record at that time.
23. The current TPS record is 6,939 tweets per second set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day
24. 572,000 is the number of new accounts created in one day (March 12, 2011)
25. 460,000 is the average number of new accounts per day created in February, 2011
26. 182% is the increase in number of mobile users over the past year.
27. In March 2011 there are an estimated 225 million users
28. 25 billion tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
29. 100 million new accounts added on Twitter in 2010
30. The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010