According to the site Gigatweet, we are about an hour away from the 10 billionth tweet sent since the dawn of Twitter. More incredible, this milestone comes less than 5 months after the 5 billionth tweet.
The only problem? It’s not an exact science.
Gigatweet isn’t counting to an exact number, but rather is extrapolating out when the 10 billionth tweet will hit based on previous tweet data provided from a range of sources. Most recently, we do know that Twitter is seeing about 50 million tweets per day now, because the service released that information. Other than that, it’s kind of a crapshoot.
To determine when the 5 billionth tweet would happen, watchers were looking at the numbers appended on to the URL of each tweet when it’s sent. The same is true this time around. For example, this recent tweet has the number 9996229078 in the URL. So yes, it would seem that is tweet number 9,996,229,078, but the problem is that Twitter has altered these numbers several times over the years, notably to move up the so-called Twitpocalypse (both 1 and 2).
As Twitter employee Ryan King notes, “Though its more numerology than math, it still scares me that this is my job,” followed by a link to Gigatweet. What he means is that no, it’s not exactly right, but it’s kind of cool, and perhaps close enough.
An interesting side note: the guy who sent tweet number 5 billion, Robin Sloan, now works at Twitter. Who will be number 10 billion? We’ll know in about an hour.
Update: And here it is — but apparently, most of us can’t see it because that user has a protected stream. What a buzzkill.
Update 2: According to Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, the whole team was watching for the tweet on the “big board.”
Ok.
PS: When’s your 10 billionth foursquare checkin coming up? LOL
2 weeks, tops.
Why is it that, every inch of my body forces me not to feel any excitement with this event?
I mean the 10 billion songs of Apple iTunes was really nice.. But this? Nahh,
10 billion tweets (90% came from retweets, automated, bot message, spam, feeds, etc)
Poor humans… what’s left with us?
a nice growth margin
But the data explain a problem: Many people have nothing to do
er~just like Japan “Twitter”: http://bit.ly/9L4n35
THIS IS EXCITING!
Uh, not really.
Well, its a great measure of how much money has been wasted.
10 Billion X 0.5c/text = $50M wasted so far.
WTF?
Everyone doesn’t send all their tweets by SMS.
Uhh… except most tweets don’t come from SMS…
Why is it that, every inch of my body forces me not to feel any excitement with this event?
I mean the 10 billion songs of Apple iTunes was really nice.. But this? Nahh,
10 billion tweets (90% came from retweets, automated, bot message, spam, feeds, etc)
Poor humans… what’s left with us?..
> the problem is that Twitter has altered these numbers several times over the years, notably to move up the so-called Twitpocalypse (both 1 and 2).
Twitter itself was not affected by the ‘lypses. The people affected were developers of twitter clients who didn’t plan ahead for large status ID values above either 2.1 or 4.2 billion (approximate).
I don’t see any reason why there would be any “holes” in Twitter’s ID increments. But regardless, it’s the 10 billion number itself that means something, even if it’s not truly the 10 billionth tweet.
I’ve spent way too much time talking about such an irrelevant topic. :)
I wish my tweet becomes 10th billion one..:)
Well, I guess you better get twitting.
*tweeting
I know it’s tweeting. And I did mean to say “twitting”.
Try for the 20th now!
dollars to donuts the 10 billionth is going to spam bot. they account for most the tweets at this point so its only logical.
So what do you get for the 10 billionth tweet?
you guys have nothing else to do ?
10 Billion is impressive, but still a bit behind the number of SMS exchanged every single day (~13B SMS/day in 2009). Twitter has a nice growth margin ahead :)
source: http://www.telecomasia.net/content/joy-text-5-trillion-sms-150b
The fact that Twitter is rapidly catching up to the number of SMS exchanged every day is amazing.
Rapidly catching up? SMS was 13 billion PER DAY. twitter is 10 billion TOTAL, after MORE THAN THREE YEARS.
WTF?
Reading down these comments, I wonder how many more morons I’ll have to post this in response to.
And a completely pointless tweet it will be I’m sure.
yeah, something like “oops, I just burped”.
Everyone would try to compete to become 10 billionth tweet and I think it will beat gigatweets charts by large… it would be a big jump in number of tweets then ;)
Twitter = most over-hyped garbage fad of all time
Amen to that.
I have been tweeting for two plus years and its fun. I have also learned that its also dangerous to your credibility if you don’t say the write words at the correct 140 limit. Life can be augmented.
a few of them tweets were mine!
Tweet # 10 Billion is from a protected account. Sad.
curl http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/show/10000000000.json
{“request”:”/1/statuses/show/10000000000.json”,”error”:”Sorry, you are not authorized to see this status.”}
Then she wins: http://twitter.com/SheSz_FUcINgBAD/status/10000000001
Oh please no… she’s just the first loser
yes, yes she certainly does
What a let down!
FYI first update link is giving me a 403 error.
Someone told me in 2007 that Twitter was “only for losers who couldn’t fill their day with facebook”. hmmmm new crystal ball needed there I think.
but how much of these 10 billion Tweets are spam? real time search engines such as http://sency.com/ have their hands full
Thats a lots of chips eaten and toilet visits!
I don’t know about you, but I don’t tweet as if it was a short version of LiveJournal. Twitter also did a blog article on how a great deal of people don’t either. They showed how Twitter is no longer about answering the question “what are you doing?” but has a much broader and deeper scope.
It is very good to hear 10billions of sms. <a href=
A little off topic. But was wondering if one was to create something similar to stumbleupon, would it have any chance of succeeding?
Not unless it had a compelling feature which set it apart from the existing one… If it’s the same, there is no reason to use something with less market share, as market share is important for a product like Stumbleupon.
How to quantify 10 billion tweets on Twitter:
http://t.cnet.com/14m
Awesome post MG!
That sucks :(
That explains ! “Twitter Over Capacity !” lol.