By Comment by Gordon Farrer
At 11.54am today (AEST), someone, somewhere in the world tapped out and sent the 10 billionth tweet. That's not a bad effort from a platform so often ridiculed by critics for being a lightweight, useless waste of time.
Ten billion isn't the only big number associated with Twitter. Late last month the service hit a daily average of 50 million tweets sent at a rate of, give or take a few dips and bumps in the graph, two-and-a-half million every hour.
More impressive are Twitter's longer term growth statistics: the service, launch less than four years ago, saw its one billionth tweet about a year ago and the five billionth just four months ago.
Such staggering exponential growth can't last, of course - at this rate, by lunchtime next Tuesday more tweets will have been sent than there are stars visible to the naked eye.
Eventually the numbers must slow up. But even with each tweet limited to 140 characters, that's a lot of data flying around cyberspace via Twitter, chewing up a fair bit of juice, pulling a lot of eyeballs and spreading huge amounts of information to people in all corners of the planet.
And that information includes considerably more than the often ridiculed I'm-filing-my-nails-on-the-tram-watching-a-cloud-float-by variety that typified Twitter in its early days.
Back then the invitation on the website was for users to send posts answering the question "What are you doing?" To fit in with its evolution into an information-spreader, late last year that question was changed to "What's happening?"
The changing of the question points to the most significant aspect of Twitter's evolution. People still use it to share the minutiae of their lives with their peers but, increasingly, more people are using it to report what is going on around them.
When a plane crashes into New York's Hudson River. A bridge starts to collapse in San Francisco. People are attacked by police as they protest in Tehran about a disputed election result. These are the sorts of newsworthy moments being reported on Twitter. As more tweeters are going to the service asking "What do I need to know?", others, increasingly, are saying, "Here's what I think you need to know."
The trick for Twitter, with so much information flowing through it, is how to sift the sands of real-time news as well as the masses of links to blogs, useful articles and resources shared every minute by its millions of users. How can it help followers find the needles of interest in the 2.5 million-tweets-an-hour haystack?
Teaming up with internet search platforms such as Google and Bing and creating partnerships as it did recently with Yahoo! will help tap into the growing thirst for real-time information. And it will also help Twitter as it tries to develop the elusive revenue model that will make the business profitable for its many trusting venture capital investors ($US160 million worth at last count) who have not yet seem a dime.
But the 10 billion tweet milestone would please Twitter's founders for another reason.
In a recent interview, Twitter creative director Biz Stone spoke of the company's "bigger picture" and his belief, shared with co-founder Evan Williams, that "software can augment humanity in productive and meaningful ways".
"The bigger picture," Stone told me, "is the basic belief that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. That's something Evan and I have been working on for a decade or so now, developing these large-scale systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate.
"We've seen the powerful impact that it can have and we've seen the good that it can do around the world. So there's a bigger mission in creating these kinds of information-sharing systems."
You can't help but think that as Stone and his team watched the 10 billionth tweet tick over from their offices in downtown San Francisco, they must have been marvelling at how big their big picture is getting, minute by minute.
Gordon Farrer is The Age's technology editor.
Twitter: untanglingweb
To see a running tally of tweets as they are sent: http://popacular.com/gigatweet/