Twitter user sends the world's 20,000,000,000th tweet

Published on Sunday 1 August 2010 17:08

TWITTER'S 20 billionth message did not make much sense, but it spoke volumes about the rapid global growth of the microblogging service.

The record breaking tweet came at 12.44am local time in Japan yesterday from user GGGGGGo-Lets--Go, where Twitter exploded in popularity over the last year.

The San Francisco-based company estimates the Japanese send nearly eight million tweets a day, about 12 per cent of the global total and second only to the United States.

The tweet itself is hard to decipher, since it appears to be part of a longer conversation between two users.

"So that means the barrage might come back later all at once," wrote the declared graphic designer and avid fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows baseball team in Japanese.

It did not take long before GGGGGGo--Lets-Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world for hitting the social networking milestone.

The Twitterer wrote: "I'm grateful and humbled by those who are visiting because of my 20 billionth tweet. Be warned, I tweet a lot about baseball."

While it took Twitter four years to reach tweet number ten billion earlier this year in March, it took less than five months to double the figure.

Japanese Twitter users set a world record when the whistle blew in the World Cup game in which Japan beat Denmark at 3,283 tweets per second.