Twitter milestone - 2 billion tweets in one month

I understand Twitter. Twitter is not chat or IM. Twitter is not a replacement for email. And Twitter is not the end of SMS.

For the month of May 2010, Twitter officially had 2 billion tweets per month. According to Pingdom ...

Back in December 2009, the number of tweets per month on Twitter reached 1 billion for the first time. Now in May, we reached yet another milestone: 2 billion tweets per month (or to be precise, 1.99 billion, which is close enough).

Ezra Gottheil said “... that’s promising for Twitter”, an analyst with Technology Business Research. “Fads tend to accelerate upward and come crashing down. It looks like people are finding real uses for Twitter… I don’t have the data, but I think there’s been a shift in usage.”

The percentage of Twitter accounts currently tweeting with any regularity is approximately 17%. That’s a really low number. But Gottheil perhaps describes this as: “You can have a lot of people trying Twitter and lose most of them but still increase both the number of users and the level of use.” 

Pingdoms describes the 2 billion tweets as ... “Maybe Twitter won’t quite be able to reach the almost 6 billion tweets per month we’ve predicted for the end of the year, but it’s clear that the Twitter platform is still growing at a healthy pace. Close to doubling the volume of monthly tweets in the last six months is no small feat.”

Twitter is still innovating - a partner ad platform and usability enhancements - my prediction (June 2010) is that Twitter will be acquired and morphed into a new Social Media platform in the next 2 years. But now it continues to grow at a fast pace.

Twitter is has gained critical mass and is going to disappear anytime soon. According to Twitterholic, Britney Spears, Ashton Kucher, Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga and Barack Obama make up the top 5 most followed people in the world using twitter. These 5 people have more than 20 million people following them. Maybe Twitter will morph into something else in a few years. But this is the internet – that’s practically a given. In the meantime, I am happy to tweet every whimsical thought I have.