Twitter sees 20 billionth tweet

Like blogging a few years ago, Twitter is often sneered at by people, saying that it’s merely a way for people to tell the world the boring minutiae of their daily lives. While it’s easy to write off the microblogging site as featuring nothing of worth, the fact that it’s recently seen its 20 billionth update surely tells you something.

The 20 billionth tweet itself is meaningless in isolation, as it was part of a wider conversation. A graphic designer in Tokyo said:

“So that means the barrage might come back later all at once.”

The fact that it was a Japanese user who posted the 20 billionth tweet is significant, because the site is seeing huge growth in that country over the last year. It is now thought that around 12 per cent of tweets originate there. Only the US produces more.

You can say a lot more in 140 characters in Japan, of course, which might help. The greatest ever density of Twitter updates was seen during the Japan v Denmark World Cup match when there were 3,283 tweets per second.

Two months ago, Twitter saw its 15 billionth tweet and five months before that, its 10 billionth. It had taken four years to reach that point, but now there are around 300,000 users signing up daily.