Twitter’s 20 billionth message didn’t make much sense, but it spoke volumes about the rapid global growth of the microblogging service.
It came at 12.44 am (local time) on Sunday from user “GGGGGGo Lets Go” in Japan, where Twitter has 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 US.
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 didn’t take long before GGGGGGo Lets Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world for hitting the social networking milestone. The user bio changed shortly thereafter.
“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 10 billion earlier in 2010 in March, it took less than five months to double the figure thanks to its increasing popularity worldwide.
Twitter chief executive Evan Williams travelled to Tokyo earlier in July to celebrate its success in Japan. “We’ve come a long way in two years especially in Japan,” he told an enthusiastic crowd of about 500.