Twitter Attracting Half A Million New Users Daily, Plus Other Fun Facts

Since launching five years ago Twitter has seen mammoth growth and this week they took some time to celebrate their fifth anniversary by announcing that the social media service is now attracting more than 460,000 new users each day.

The world’s first ever Tweet was sent on March 21, 2006 and since then the following growth and milestones have occurred:

In just three years, two months and one day someone tweeted the billionth tweet. Today one billion tweets are sent each week.
Over the last year 50 million tweets were sent each day. On March 11, 2011, the tally was 177 million.
After Michael Jackson died in 2009 users sent 56 tweets per second. New Year’s Day this year saw a new record with 6,939 tweets after midnight in Japan on New Year’s morning there.
572,000 new accounts created on March 12, 2011; Over the prior month leading up to that day 460,000 new accounts were created on average daily.
Mobile users increased 182% in the past year.
Twitter has 400 employees today, while in January 2008 they had 8.

To put those numbers into perspective, Foursquare has yet to pass the 10 million user mark, although I will acknowledge that they are two vastly different types of social networking systems.

Now if only Twitter would get rid of the constant spam accounts that have left me using Twitter far less than I use to I might actually be impressed by their site numbers, but a million spam accounts (I know it’s probably a ridiculous guess) does not a good social network make.