This week in 2006, designers began creating a prototype of what would become Twitter. Jack Dorsey sent the world's first tweet on March 21, 2006. On its blog, Twitter took the opportunity to point out some key stats, including:
It took three years, two months and one day to get to the billionth tweet. Now there are a billion tweets a week.
A year ago, people sent 50 million tweets a day. On March 11, 2011, the tally was 177 million.
There were 456 tweets per second after Michael Jackson died in 2009. That record was broken on New Year's Day this year with 6,939 tweets after midnight in Japan on New Year's morning there.
There were 572,000 new accounts created on March 12, 2011; there were 460,000 new accounts created daily, on average, in the past month.
Mobile users increased 182% in the past year.
Twitter has 400 employees today, compared to eight in January 2008.