The Big 0-5

Today is the 5th birthday of Twitter, a.k.a. the information superhighway's favorite phenomenon and microblogging site.

Twitter may top out at a speed of 140 characters per update, but the site is still flying high, with nearly 1 billion new tweets every week. If only they could make a BlackBerry app that'd work properly, so I could read them all... #FirstWorldProblem

App issues aside, Twitter is growing by leaps in bounds. Within the past year, the average number of tweets per day has exploded, going from 50 million to 140 million. Again, that's 140 million tweets every 24 hours, folks. (For more Twitter stats, check out #numbers, which was posted to the official Twitter Blog last week)

Site co-founder Biz Stone (@Biz) spewed some interesting stats in a celebratory bday blog entry earlier today:

"Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets," he said. "While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day."

To celebrate Twitter's 5th anniversary, I suggest you grab yourself a big slice of cake and check out the most recent edition of my Tweets of the Week column in Vegas Seven. :P But before that, I'll leave you with some food for thought, courtesy of our good friends at Wired:

7 in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world. Of the remainder, just 6% get re-tweeted, and 92% of those re-tweets occur within the 1st hour. In other words, fewer than 1 in 200 messages get re-tweeted after an hour. 

Moral of the story: You've got 140 characters. Make 'em count—today, especially.