Twitter Blows Past 20-Billionth Tweet

A graphic designer in Tokyo has unlocked a fairly significant accomplishment on Twitter—posting the service’s 20-billionth message since the site’s inception in July of 2006. It’s somewhat difficult to translate exactly what user “GGGGGGo_Lets_Go” was saying in the official tweet. However, his translated response to the news is far clearer:

“It looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet. I’m getting replies from people all over the world. It’s scary. What are the chances? Maybe I’m going to die. Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke,” he wrote, as reported and translated by Computerworld.

It’s been a mere two months since Twitter’s 15-billionth tweet and all of five months since Twitter hit tweet number ten billion. Crunch the numbers, and it’s easy to see that Twitter is on an upswing of activity—perhaps fueled in part by the record Twitter posting recorded during this year’s World Cup tournament. It did take Twitter four years, after all, to reach the ten-billion-tweet mark.

According to Twitter itself, the service adds approximately 300,000 new users on a daily basis. That’s in addition to the 105 million registered users the company was reporting as of mid-April this year. It’s unclear, however, just how that number is separated into “regular Twitter users” versus spam accounts or those that sign up, tweet a few times, and never come back.

Twitter reported in February that the service was seeing roughly 50 million Tweets per day, or 600 tweets per second. That’s quite a bit away from the service’s 2007 activity levels–approximately 5,000 tweets per day. It’s also a bit below the activity levels seen during the World Cup, where Twitter hit its record-setting metric of 3,283 tweets per second at the conclusion of the Japan-Denmark game.

However, with great traffic and usage levels comes great potential for slowdowns and instability—a chief criticism of Twitter has been its “fail whale,” or the iconic imagery frequently associated with one’s inability to log into the service, update a status, or engage with Twitter in any capacity. To that end, Twitter’s initiated plans to transfer its operations into a new, custom-built data center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

As well, reads the Twitter blog, “Making sure Twitter is a stable platform and a reliable service is our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this effort, and we have moved resources from other important projects to focus on the issue.”

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