We’re pretty heavy users of Twitter here at GeekWire, using the short-form communications service as our content marketing vehicle of choice. And we’re not alone. Twitter, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week, released some pretty fascinating numbers today about the growth of the service. Consider this: People are now sending on average 144 million Tweets per day. And just to put that number in more perspective. I’ve sent a total of 4,757 Tweets to date.

That’s almost one Tweet for every other person in the U.S. Do you think the company is on track to become the “pulse of the planet?”

Of course, the company didn’t release one key number: revenue. Anyway, here are stats from the Twitter blog post today:

  • 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
  • 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
  • 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
  • 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
  • 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
  • 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
  • 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts

  • 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
  • 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
  • 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

John Cook is co-founder of GeekWire, a technology news site based in Seattle. Follow on Twitter: @geekwirenews.

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