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Twitter Makes Extraordinary Prediction

By the time you finish reading this article, nearly 30,000 tweets will have been posted.   On December 19, Mashable announced that there were officially more than more tweets in the world than people.  While the world population is roughly 6.79 billion people, the number of tweets is now well over 7 billion.  It took roughly three years, to get 7 billion tweets, which is very impressive.  That’s averaging 1.75 billion tweets a year, mind you that Twitter hit 3 billion tweets in April of this year followed by 5 billion in mid-late October. 

In an Online Times article, Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone write, “In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day. We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world.”

A billion Tweets an hour?!?!  That seems like a little much and it may take most of 2010 to actually get there.  However, Stone states that Twitter is more than a social network and microblog anymore.  It’s now a “real-time information network,” for people to share information and news from around the world.

The Iran protests stand out in many people’s minds.  Over the summer, Twitter became the world’s way of communicating with Iran, since the government limited and then later banned from the mainstream media from covering what was happening within the country.  Citizens used social media to post videos and pictures to show with the world what was happening.

“My co-founder Evan Williams and I have spent the past 10 years developing large systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate openly,” writes Stone. “We are united in our belief that software has the ability to augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways.”

Today, Twitter says there are nearly 27 million tweets sent out a day.