In a statistic that is as frightening as it is startling, Twitter now reports that 200 million messages go out into the Twitterverse every day, which is equal to a 10-million page book in tweets, or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Let's blow your mind a little more with how else Twitter breaks this down (they even made an illustration, as you can see on the right):
Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.
Tweets have shot up in epic numbers since January 2009, when only two million messages went out a day. A year ago, 65 million.
So, are there people tweeting, or are there more automatically-generated messages proliferating out there, masquerading as hand-typed and thought-out tweets, as TechCrunch hypothesizes?
Or, is it the work of the hardy souls who live out their lives on Twitter, the minority 20,000 or so Twitterati — out of an estimated 287 million currently registered users — who account for more than half of that epic volume of tweets? (Yeah, Ashton Kutcher, we're talking about YOU.)
(Twopcharts says more than 327 million have registered for Twitter accounts, "based on the assumption that all accounts are registered sequentially and started with number 1" since the micro-blogging service began in March 2006, but on its Twopblog, it estimates about 12 percent of those registered have probably canceled. So we took that percentage and used it against the 327 million number to figure about 287 million active accounts are out there.)
Twitter's last official statement on accounts was at the beginning of the year, when they sent an email to users that stated, "There are about 200 million accounts on Twitter now."
Twitter also listed its top Trending Topics for the first half of 2011, and while some aren't a surprise — Mubarak, Fukushima, William & Kate on the "World events/news" site; Rebecca Black, Charlie Sheen and Bieber alert on the "Pop culture" end — others did make us pause. Such as: Tom & Jerry (yes, as in the cartoon), mixed martial artist Anderson Silva and Mumford & Sons (love the song, but had no idea they'd gotten so huge!).
More stories:
- Paid tweets coming to Twitter streams
- Twitter reinforces more following than tweeting
- Twitter's most frequent squawkers a loud minority
Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who contributes some of those 200 million tweets a day.