Although we’re sure an awful lot of these were of the inane “I’m going to the shops for some fags” variety, there’s no denying that Twitter’s total of over 10 billion tweets is one hell of an impressive figure.
The total was passed some time last night, although it seems that we’ll never know the contents of the landmark tweet because it belonged to a protected user.
The milestone reflects the phenomenal growth of the free social networking and microblogging service, which hit its first billion tweets back in November 2008, and smashed through the 5 billion tweets limit just four months ago.
The service first started in 2006 by American software architect and businessman Jack Dorsey, who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and built the first prototype of Twitter in two weeks.
Still only 33 years old, he’s been described as one of technology’s “best and brightest” by BusinessWeek and featured in the Technology Review 35 (TR35) – a list acclaiming remarkable innovators under the age of 35.
Just in case you’re one of the few people on the planet not acquainted with Twitter, here’s Wikipedia‘s definition:
Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers.
Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
