Twitter to deliver “several billion tweets” an hour next year
In a note over the weekend in the U.K.’s Times of London, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone revealed some impressive stats for next year. The company will handle 1 billion search queries a day and deliver “several billion tweets” an hour in 2010. He also said that by the time the Iranian elections happened in June, the number of Twitter accounts had grown by tenfold in a single year.
Several billion tweets an hour is astronomical if you consider that there have been roughly 7 billion tweets total so far over the company’s three year history. The number is also an order of magnitude higher than the estimated 27 million tweets a day Twitter supported last month, according to a study from Pingdom.
Some of that growth can be chalked up to new accounts, as Twitter expands overseas with mobile deals in countries like India, Australia and Indonesia. Some of it may be because people will tweet more as they get comfortable with the service.
But it seems inconsistent with the rate of growth recorded in tweets per day by outside firms. Perhaps they’re counting each time they deliver a tweet to every single one of a person’s hundreds or thousands of followers. Or perhaps they have something else up their sleeve.
