Happy Birthday Twitter!

By
Monday, 21 March 2011

It’s easy to remember working with @jack, @ev, and our tiny team on a project we called Twitter like it was last week. Amazingly, it’s five years ago today that the first tweet was sent. Over these years, Twitter has matured and made an impact in the areas of social responsibility, politics, sports, media, and more. The people who use Twitter have made it what it is today, and on our fifth birthday, it’s the people that make Twitter special who we are celebrating.

There are now more than 400 full time employees working at Twitter. In the last year alone we have made huge progress towards stability and performance. This work sets us up to continue innovating but it also allows us to build a profitable business on a strong foundation. We are in a position now which allows us to continue serving and delighting everyone who relies on Twitter to connect them to that which is meaningful for another five years and beyond.

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. 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. All of this momentum and growth often pales in comparison to a single compassionate Tweet by a caring person who wants to help someone in need.

The people who use Twitter make it special because for any interest we might have, somebody is tweeting about it. We’re lucky to have so many people using Twitter in so many interesting and important ways. This month, I celebrated my own birthday. It’s a gift to be able to work with some of the most talented, thoughtful, and smart people I’ve ever known. It’s because of them that my life has been made better. Happy Birthday, Twitter—and thank you.