The ten billionth tweet appears on Twitter

Somebody somewhere published the 10 billionth tweet this week, but this is only a marker in Twitter’s huge and ongoing growth.

In February, the social networking site attained an average of 50m tweets a day, which works out at 2.5m every hour. But to really make sense of these numbers, you need to take a look at the big picture.

It was only a year ago that the site saw its billionth tweet and only five months ago that it saw its five billionth. Furthermore, four years ago, the site didn’t even exist.

Exponential growth like this can’t last forever, because there are only so many potential users out there, but with more people accessing the site via their mobile phones, there’s still room for a lot of growth.

The usage of the site has subtly shifted over time as well. The question that originally appeared at the top of the site was ‘What are you doing?’ but it now reads ‘What’s happening?’ – a subtle difference, but one that reflects the use of Twitter to find out about the wider world rather than purely for logging the minutiae of the day.