Twitter @ 5: Journey from social site to 'Social Activist'

San Francisco, Jun 17: It's party time! Your favourite social networking site Twitter has turned five years old on Saturday, July 16. Twitter launched its micro bolgging service on Jul 15, 2006 and its users sent 224 tweets on the first day.

Twitter started the service in the name 'Twittr' and it was described as "a new mobile service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS." The new statistics released by Twitter on its birthday will reveal the popularity it gained in past 5 years. While it got 224 tweets on the first day of the service, now this number of tweets are send in every tenth of a second!

"There were 224 Tweets sent on July 15, 2006. Today, users send that many Tweets in less than a tenth of a second," Twitter said in its Twitter account.

Also, officials added that Twitter users send 350 billion tweets every day and on Jul 14, Twitter saw more than 600,000 signups.

"Delivering 350 billion Tweets a day is a terribly fun engineering challenge. But, it doesn't capture how passionate our users are."

During the past five years, Twitter has turned from a simple micro-blogging site to pro-active social platform that played a crucial role in changing the world. During the Middle East and African uprisings, Twitter become an important tool in spreading the democratic protest against tyranny leaders.

Moreover, Twitter was the most important source of information during the Japan earthquake and tsunami. Stranded and injured people walked back to life through the tweets they send to their friends. Also, Twitter broke out many 'Breaking News' to rest of the world and now it is one of the fastest platform to gather news.

Similarly, during the recent serial blasts in Mumbai, Twitter was flooding with all information about the injured and the death toll. Many Twitter users offered helpline, emergency contact numbers and even tweeted their phone numbers for those those needing help.

It's obvious that the Facebook boom and Google's social network Google Plus had effected Twitter, but most of us believe that the '140 characters' we tweet have more effect than the posts in other social sites. Continue Happy Tweeting!

OneIndia News