Twitter users send 50 million tweets a day

Computerworld - New figures from the folks at Twitter show that people are tweeting furiously.

Three years ago, the microblogging company was handling 5,000 tweets per day, according to Kevin Weil, the analytics lead at Twitter Inc. Since then, though, that number has gone up -- by a lot.

In a blog post on the Twitter site today, Weil said that 50 million tweets are posted every day. That's an average of 600 tweets per second. Weil noted that Twitter strips out the spam tweets before calculating the daily totals.

Twitter use has been steadily climbing.

In 2008, the site was managing 300,000 tweets per day. By early 2009, that figure had grown to 2.5 million per day. Then the volume of Tweets grew by 1,400% to reach 35 million per day by the end of last year.

However, Weil didn't say how many users account for the current 50 million tweets per day. Are the top 10% of users, for instance, responsible for 80% of all tweets? That's not clear.

Just last month, a study from RJMetrics Inc. showed that the number of Twitter users has climbed to 75 million.

The study also showed that a lot of Twitter accounts are inactive and that the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December. According to RJMetrics, only 17% of all Twitter accounts posted tweets in December. That's down from more than 70% in early 2007, when Twitter was a fledgling operation with far fewer users.

Twitter, according to the RJMetrics report, has between 10 million and 15 million active tweeters.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

Read more about Web Apps in Computerworld's Web Apps Topic Center.