Twitter users now sending 1 billion tweets per week

Five years ago this week, Jack Dorsey began engineering the platform we lovingly know as Twitter. On March 21, 2006, @jack aka Jack Dorsey sent the first Tweet.

Today, Twitter released a set of numbers demonstrating its tremendous growth worldwide. We love Twitter here at The Next Web so we felt compelled to share:

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Facts include:

• Twitter reached 1 billion tweets in 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. Now Twitter users send 1 billion tweets per week.
• One year ago, users sent an average of 50 million tweets per day. Today, that average is 140 million. And the number is growing: There were 177 million tweets sent out last Friday on March 11, 2011.
• At the start of this year, Twitter users in Japan set the tweets per second record at 6,939 tweets per second, 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.
• The average number of accounts created per day is 460,000. Over half a million (572,000) accounts were created this past Saturday, March 12, 2011.
• There has been a 182% increase in Twitter mobile users this past year.
• And of course, Twitter itself has grown from 8 employees in January 2008 to 400 employees today.

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