Twitter rules the world @jack #Tweets

  Nearly six years ago, a small team of people started working on a prototype of the service that we now know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet.

Today, on every measure of growth and engagement, Twitter is growing at a record pace. Here are some numbers:

#tweets

·         3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.

·         1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.

·         50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago. 2009

·         140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month. March2010

·         177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.

·         456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).

·         6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts

·         572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.

·         460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.

·         182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

The simple fact is that Twitter is now changing the world, it’s impact is startling and in truth just a little scary. Why are these 140 character messages just so powerful and what does the future hold ? Why are celebrities so hooked on giving us so much detail of their life, why are governments so afraid of this, does this mean we communicate more than before or less ? For me that’s the thing with Twitter, it has created so many questions rather than any answers.

I have a Twitter account, but in truth I have no real idea why, what I am doing with it, or if I will ever really have a use for it. But there are generations behind me that believe it is the most important application on the web. With all the millions of websites, the one that gives you 140 characters is the most important and most powerful. How weird is that.