The Incredible Growth of Twitter

It was during a brain-storming session of a podcasting company known as Odeo that Twitter was created. The idea was to take text messages to the next level and allow them to go to groups within the company. It was a service that went public in July of 2006.

They decided on the name Twitter because the name itself means “chirps from birds” and in this case small bursts of information.

Today Twitter has more than 500 million users who generate 340 million tweets a day and it’s real time news without filters and censorship.

In January, 2008 the company had eight employees. Today Twitter has more than 650.

It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to reach the one billionth tweet. Now a billion tweets takes only three days.

When Michael Jackson died in 2009 there were a record 456 tweets per second. That’s nothing compared to the current record set during the World Cup soccer match between the United States and Japan when 7,196 tweets were sent per second.

An average of 460,000 new Twitter accounts are created each day.