Twitter: a multi-billion dollar business that started with a 140 character idea [10 interesting facts]

New Delhi: Popular micro-blogging network Twitter has become so popular, so fast. Everyday millions and millions use Twitter to update to inform people what they are up to at any given moment of the day – via cellphone, instant messenger, or the Web.It's a platform wherein users share news, thoughts and messages in 140 characters of text or less all over the world. A person who is interested to follow you can easily read your tweets. Some members also refereed Twitter as the SMS of Internet. Profiles people create are (usually) public — anyone in the world can see what you write, unless you elect to make your profile private. As per the latest reports, nearly 500 million people tweet on a daily basis out of which nearly 290 million people use it regularly. Twitter is one of the common habits of most of the USA, UK person's daily routine. In fact, Twitter has become a kind of hypergrapevine news resource — a way of instant messaging your circle of friends about your interests or consumer rants and raves.Here is a list of interesting facts about what makes Twitter a global phenomenon:It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion Tweets to be sent on the platform. Now a billion tweets are sent every two and a half days. Put another way, that's three for every man, woman and child in the U.S.Over 200 million people regularly use Twitter (this is Twitter's own figure, but Global World Index puts it at 288 million).The original project code name for the service was twttr which was later changed to Twitter.On August 3, 2013, Japanese Twitter users hit a peak of 143,199 tweets per second (TPS) during a showing of a movie called Castle in the Sky. The record, Twitter says, involved a spike of about 25 times higher than normal activity.In the latest quarter, Facebook had $1.6 billion in ad revenue. By 2015, Twitter's annual ad revenue is expected to hit $1.3 billion.In 2013, a superbowl performance by @Beyonce had 268 million tweets per minute, more than any other event in past two years.Most of Twitter's revenue comes from advertising. @eMarketer estimates $582.8 million this year, up from $288.3 million in 2012.There are 10 users especially employed by the Mc Donald's to run their Twitter account.Number of Twitter employees: Jan 2008 – 8; Jan 2009 – 29; Jan 2010 – 130; Jan 2011- 350; March 2011 – 400 (Have put in request to Twitter for more recent figure). Greatest number of followers worldwide: @justinbieber – 44,433,161 (Canadian pop teen)