5 years ago, Twitter opened to the public.

5 years ago, on July 15, 2006, the twttr service was opened to the public. One of its founders, Biz Stone, called it "a new mobile service that helps groups of friends discuss random thoughts via SMS." The microblogging platform, already known as Twitter, has grown into something that Biz Stone with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams could never have imagined.

Earlier this year, Japanese Twitter users set a record 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on the first day of the New Year: 6,939 tweets per second. In March, Twitter users wrote a billion tweets per week. Today, on its fifth anniversary, the Twitter team published several tweets with even more impressive statistics:

• On July 15, 2006, 224 tweets were written. Today, users post as many tweets in less than a tenth of a second. ( # )
• About 350 billion tweets per day are being published. ( # )
• Yesterday, more than 600 thousand users registered on Twitter. And the first 600 thousand users were recruited in more than 16 months. ( # )

Happy Birthday Twitter!

[via The Next Web ]