Nearly 1 billion tweets per week – Twitter marking 5th anniversary

Five years after its inception, Twitter is now serving up an average of 140 million tweets per day, up from 50 million per day at this time last year, the company said Monday.

And that adds up to nearly 1 billion tweets each week.

Twitter Inc. released some new numbers, fittingly on Pi Day, as it commemorates the fact that development of the new message system started five years ago this week. The first tweet went out March 21, 2006, from co-founder Jack Dorsey – a simple message that read “inviting coworkers.”

Twitter really started to open eyes at the annual SXSW interactive conference in 2007. But it took 3 years, 2 months and a day to reach the first 1 billion tweets.

Last Friday, as the horror of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami started to unfold, there were 177 million tweets in one day. The record of 6,939 tweets per second was set as 2011 dawned in Japan.

Twitter also said there were 572,000 new accounts made on Saturday, although the company did not release how many members it now has. As of last September, Twitter had 175 million registered users.

The San Francisco company now has 400 employees, up from 130 in January 2010. One employee, co-founder Biz Stone, is remaining with Twitter, but is also taking on new duties as a “strategic adviser for social impact” to AOL Inc. and its new Huffington Post Media Group.

Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington said Stone will help develop AOL’s corporate philanthropy efforts.

On his own blog, Stone said giving back to the community is weaved into the culture of Twitter and “the concept of doing excellent is not proprietary. To the extent that I am able, I’d like to help more companies follow this template toward a higher definition of success and more meaningful corporate metrics.”

– Benny Evangelista

A daily dose of postings from The Chronicle’s technology blog (sfgate.com/blogs/tech)

This article appeared on page D – 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle