Five years ago today, a new web site opened up for the first time today to the general public. It was called at Twttr and at the time it didn"t get a lot of attention. That certainly isn"t the case today for the social networking service that is now called Twitter. The 140 character messaging site celebrates its fifth anniversary today, the official Twitter page reveals a few interesting tidbits of info.
On July 15, 2006 only 224 Twitter messages were posted on the site. Twitter now says its users "send that many Tweets in less than a tenth of a second." It took Twitter 18 months to gain its first 600,000 users. That"s the number of new users that Twitter signed up just on Thursday. According to ABC News, the very first message on Twitter was made by its co-founder Jack Dorsey (it was simply "Inviting coworkers"). In January 2009, that number went up to 2 million Tweets a day, and a couple of weeks ago, Twitter revealed on its blog site that it is now generating a 200 million Tweets per day.
The huge growth of the service has taken over pop culture as tons of celebrities, political figures, pro sports players and more regularity "tweet" on the site. ABC News says that the number one most followed person on Twitter is pop singer Lady Gaga with Lady Gaga with 11,644,682 followers. Another pop star, Justin Bieber, is not far behind with 11,037,025 followers and President Barack Obama comes in third with 9,121,529 followers. Yet another pop singer, Britney Spears, is fourth with 8,530,677 followers and reality TV show star is Kim Kardashian is fifth with 8,306,783 followers.