Twitter hits 5 billion tweets

Twitter has had it 5 billionth tweet, according to GigaTweet.com which measures the micro-blogging service's site traffic. GigaTweet is a simple third party app which offers up a continual count of all the tweets sent on Twitter every second.

Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only “Oh lord”.

Sloan's tweet, which he has nicknamed “The Pentagigatweet”, actually has the number 5,000,000,000 in the URL. It's sort of fitting that Twitter's 5 billionth tweet came not from one of the celebrities or marketers who have flooded the service in recent months, but from one of the quirky Bay Area dot-com nerds who formed its first loyal pack of users.

5 billion is an immense figure for any website, what makes the feat so much more unbelievable is that Twitter only hit the 1 billion mark in November 2008 – having been around since 2006.

Meanwhile, some third-party observers have been remarking that Twitter's rapid growth may be slowing down. The company recently raised another round of funding at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion.

TAGS
microblog, twitter, tweet, gigatweet, robin sloan