Twitter turns five this week. The microblogging platform has found incredible success in distilling the vast space of social networking down to one simple idea: 140-character status updates. The low level of commitment required to participate has inspired everyone from Luddites to celebrities to board the Twitter train and let their voices be heard in a public space.
To celebrate five years spent changing everything, a list of impressive statistics has been put up on the Twitter Blog in a post that is appropriately titled “#numbers.” It all started on March 21, 2006 when company founder Jack Dorsey — @jack — sent out the very first tweet: “inviting coworkers.” He certainly had no idea at the time that Twitter would catch on as it did.
Over the next three years, two months and one day, 999,999,999 more followed that innocent first tweet. Incredibly, the “billion tweet” milestone that took so many years to reach is now just a pocket change number; Twitter is home to more than one billion new tweets each week these days. The user base is increasing exponentially too, with an average of 460,000 accounts created per day over the past month. More people are microblogging on the go, too. The past year has seen a 182 percent increase in mobile usage on Twitter.
So in short… use Twitter. Everybody else is doing it.
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