This weekend somewhere in the world the 20 billionth tweet will be posted. That’s quite a staggering volume of content in just four years. Even more arresting is that fact that it took three years and eight months for the first 10 billion and just four months for the second 10 billion.
Big numbers can be a little difficult to get to get your head around so to give some sense of scale there are approximately on average over 1000 tweets posted every second and over 80 milllion a day.
Tweet number twenty billion will be posted some time a little after 3pm UTC tomorrow, 31st July 2010. You can follow Gigatweet if you want to see exactly when.
The original name for the service was twttr, inspired by sites like Flickr (and the five character length of US SMS short codes) Co-founder and current chairman Jack Dorsey published the first Twitter message on the 21st March 2006 it said “just setting up my twttr.” Four months later twitter went public. Twitter’s popularity took off after the 2007 SXSW event and it’s popularity was boosted by mainstream TV presenters like Oprah in the US and Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross in the UK.
PR and the Social Web 
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Peter Young, PR & The Social , Kate Coyle, Matt Batterham, Ramona Zachariassen and others. Ramona Zachariassen said: Amazing. RT @robbrown The 20 billionth tweet will be posted in the next 24 hours http://bit.ly/aOYXZh […]
[…] About 3 hours ago at approximately 05.00am UTC the 25 billionth tweet was posted. It took three years and eight months to reach 10 billion, the second 10 billion took another four months. The last five million posts took 50 days so the speed of growth is slowing and may even have peaked. […]