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20 Billionth Tweet Underlines Twitter’s Growth

Twitter celebrated is 20 billionth ‘tweet’ yesterday; yet another major milestone for the social networking site.

The tweet was sent by a graphic designer in Tokyo at 3.44 GMT, who upon realising he had sent the landmark message had this to say in another tweet sent minutes later:

It looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet. I’m getting messages from people all over the world, it’s scary! Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke!

The social media platform, which now recieves an incredible 300,000 new users every day, has seen continued to grow exponentially since it’s launch. It took 5 months to get from 10 billion to 20 billion tweets, but took 4 years to get from 0 to 10 billion; highlighting just how quickly the site has grown over the last year.

It seems even Twitter have been surprised by their popularity worldwide, with the demand putting extreme pressure on the companies’ servers. During certain periods this year (the World Cup in particular), millions of users were unable to log in to their accounts as usage of the site exceeded what Twitter’s IT systems could handle. Twitter do look set to address this issue however; opening their first dedicated data centre in Utah later this year.
In a blog post earlier this month, a Twitter spokesperson stated:

We’re fully aware of the problem … increasing the stability, speed and reliability of the service is our number one priority

Despite Twitter’s immense popularity, the problem of monetisation continues to be a pertinent one for the social media giant. A survey amongst Twitter users in the US showed an overwhelming majority of users would simply stop using the service if they started to charge. This puts more weight to the idea that consumers won’t pay for something that they were initally given for free.
How Twitter will address this problem is uncertain, but I’d expect to see a heavier emphasis on third party advertising on the site in the next 6-12 months.

Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrotcreative/2511539541/

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