Last week Twitter celebrated its 5th birthday.

Jack Dorsey created twitter in March 2006 and it launched in July that year. It now has over 190 million users.

Some key figures I picked up from wikipedia:

400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007
100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008
February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day
By March 2010, the company recorded over 70,000 registered applications.[
June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day

Twitter seemed to really take off in 2008 and now everyone seems to be on it, generating 65 million tweets a day and has over 800,000 search queries per day. These guys who set up Twitter were very smart. Apparently, the idea came up from a brainstorming session which was held by board members of Odeo, a podcasting company. Dorsey introduced the idea of a person using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The name was twttr which was the 5 character length of the US SMS short code. Dorsey posted his first tweet at 9:50am 5 years ago and the rest, they say is history.

His first post was: “just setting up my twttr”.

Twitter keeps setting bigger targets. When Michael Jackson died, they set a record of 456 tweets per second, but this was overtaken on New Years Eve 2010/11 when the record was 6,939 coming just four seconds after midnight. The record number of Tweets in a day sits at 177 million on March 11, 2011 so far with March 12, 2011 the biggest day for new account registrations at over 572,000 in a single day.

I wish I had thought about the Twitter idea – Jack is only a few years older than me.