If you want evidence of the sheer amount of content and data being created by Twitter, look no further than the evidence provided by Twitter analytics team member Kevin Weil on the official Twitter blog.
In 2007, Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times per day.
In 2008, Twitter users were tweeting 300,000 times per day.
In 2009 Twitter users were tweeting 2.5 million per day, and it grew 1400% to 35 million per day.
And in 2010? Twitter users are tweeting 50 million times per day, which works out at 600 tweets per second.
Kevin goes on to mention Tweet deliveries as a much higher metric, and also says that the team will make time to share more info on ways to measure and understand the information network.
50 million messages is an interesting figure considering the measurements of web-based Twitter usage are pinned at around 55 million, and several studies indicate there’s a high churn rate of new users and a high proportion of dormant accounts – it indicates those that ‘get’ Twitter tend to share a pretty high amount of information. Which isn’t unusual, considering the same curve correlates with the amount of bloggers regularly updating, for example.
It also reinforces why tweets are becoming integrated into search tools from Google, Bing and many more.