Twitter has just passed the one-billion Tweet mark, according to the Tweet counter at GigaTweet. The counter is run by Popacular, a site that lists the most popular Websites on Twitter and Delicious.
It is not clear when the counter started, but Twitter launched in July, 2006. Assuming the counter goes back that far, that would mean it took Twitter two years and three months to get to one billion Tweets. To be honest, I am kind of surprised it took so long.
As a comparison, Meebo hosts 5 billion personal IM messages a month, and bigger IM services such as Yahoo’s and AOL’s are probably doing more than one billion IMs a day.
I have an email into Twitter to see if this count is accurate.
Update: No word back from Twitter, but some more details a mystery. Each Tweet has a status ID, which may or may not correlate exactly with the number of total Tweets. In fact, some numbers skip. But if we pretend the two are the same (and there is some evidence that they are not), the one billionth Tweet was delivered last night, November 10 at 11:49 PM.
What it said will remain a mystery, though, because it belongs to a private account. (Who keeps a private account on Twitter?) And both the Tweet before and after came from automated feeds showing various headlines. The 999,999,999th Tweet from an account named folkhero reads:
Revision3 Reports Tripled Earnings for 2008 http://tinyurl.com/444vcs
And the 1,000,000,001st Tweet comes from a bot called CyrstalLake:
CL News: PR Newswire Summary of Technology Copy, Nov. 10, 2008 – StreetInsider.com (subscript.. http://snipr.com/5barm
Twitter has been taken over by bots. What did you expect?
Now all we need is someone to calculate the cost to business of 1 billion worthless messages. Then Twitter would have a valuation.
Not worthless messages if you use it well.
I get the right information from the right people, as soon as they send it out (ie immediate TechCrunch tweet with a title and link to any new article, for example).
But.. it’s true that a lot of people just don’t ‘get’ Twitter yet.
Wortless? I think not.
In the past few weeks I’ve used Twitter (in conjunction with iPhone/Twinkle) to do the following farily specific things:
Find out where I am, and what’s around me.
Find a couch to crash on for a night.
Find a cool bar.
Find a ride from the airport to the city.
Find out what bus goes from the airport to the city.
Find out how much that bus costs, where it is, and when it arrives.
Find out what seats on an Amtrak have an electrical outlet.
Find out that there is a story behind a statue of a troll under a bridge in Fremont, outside of Seattle.
People on Twitter are amazingly helpful, and the community is nothing short of amazing. I started using it in a way that I didn’t realize was possible.
I just joined the other day and I have no followers as yet but soon thought
Twitter is growing at a very high speed….
Thanks, as if we didn’t knew that.
AHAHAHAHAHAH, love the douchiness.
Your comparison makes it sound like Twitter should be expected to produce the same traffic as IM, which is just preposterous. Nobody (except maybe Scoble) has day-to-day conversations via Twitter the way they do over IM, and clearly nobody should.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service, not a public IM service.
Yeah, but what about Scoble? That should be like 100 million Tweets a day right there.
We should measure total tweets in Scoble units.
incidentally, twitter only archives a user’s last 3200 tweets, so there’s some need for a robust twitter backup solution. Someone needs to get cracking and give us one.
one billion “tweets”…means something, i’m not sure what
And my 11,418 since March 2007 are more than a drop in that 1 billion bucket. Why? Cause they are mine… and I want them all back through an archive @ev!
You should check out @twitties or twitties.com – they followed the billionth tweet by looking at the numbers on status updates. Funnily enough, the first public tweet after 1 billion was by a bot
@twitties didn’t discover it. It was @blairblends that discovered it.
http://digg.com...hrough_API_FAIL
has 1 billion messages served provided management with some insight into how to monetize the service?
that’s a good question – it’snot like there aren’t plenty of ideas for monetization out there.
I love Twitter
Jason –
Twitter’s not a public IM service? You must not be following the right people
Twitter is a web2.0 masterpiece
The next real question would be to try and figure out how many calories of the “I’m eating X” tweets have been consumed.
Bah! They’d have got here a lot quicker if it wasn’t for all the downtime.
seems like that took quite awhile
No wonder in growing Twitter. The powerful tool is very useful for tweeting. Tweet tweet tweet…
i ran across this site it is not searching on keywords but it appears to bring out collective concepts over twitter and URLS. It took me a minute but it appears you can place full URLs in there and it will bring up related concepts (not tagging). I did some research and it appears to be doing some form of semantic intelligence learning.
oops put the URL in the wrong place:
http://www.mashmeup.com
If it is, in fact, using semantic intelligence to map related concepts between urls and twitter (which I agree it looks like it is), marketers could use it to see who’s talking about concepts related to their product/url. Looks like you can “mash” text, not just a url, to get even more targeted mapping…
TechCrunch should start moderating stupid comments, else I’ll move to Slashdot.
Billion tweets is just a number and real thing will happen once we’ll have clear business model about how they really gonna make money.
One more thing, why is that TechCrunch keeps the slug of posts insanely big? See the slug in this post http://www.tech...and-blackberry/
14 characters.
Please leave. Nobody will care, least of all, Arrington. Check RSS subs. Get lost. Good riddance.
Did you see that? One more stupid comment.
Good chance Twitter will be on pace with Meebo within 1 year.
1 billion tweets and zero revenue
A lot of tweets (testing something)
A small caveat: The number of tweets sent does not equal the number of tweets received because everyone has multiple friends. For instance, when I sent 1 tweet, roughly 100 people see it, but when Scoble sends 1 tweet 20,000+ see it.
The Indians have invaded TechCrunch.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
How long till profitability? Oh wait, no one cares about that.
Great product, but still no revenue income in sight. And i agree, I’ve used twitter for a while now and wealth of information I’ve received is beyond amazing!
Btw
Check out http://www.jobstaxi.com
New Jobs. Nixon Inc.. oDesk. Rockstar New England. FixYa. Snap. Gorilla Nation.
Thought this would be interesting …
1,000,000,000 tweets in two years is
500,000,000 tweets a year is
~1369863 tweets a day is
~57078 tweets an hour is
~951 tweets a minute
~16 tweets a second
Similar to the number of tourists crossing Charles Bridge in Prague… well, knock off a couple of decimal places maybe.
Twitter is okay, but I can’t manage to connect it to my cellphone, that sucks. And yeah, the growth is amazing but blogging still kicks ass
For those interested:
Tweet text: 「ほのちゃんに歯が生えた」のほのかちゃんがもう１９歳て！あれから１９年！http://tinyurl.com/5lrcjv
Rough translation: the tweeter is expressing shock and awe at a 19 year old actress debuting in a new film.
User Name: annchan
Screen Name: annchan2
Hey Tweeters!
We are constantly updating our new site with absolutely free, never-seen-before on the net twitter backgrounds!!!
Check us out at http://www.free...witterskins.com
See you there!
this is amazing it is faster growing than Facebook..