“Inviting co-workers”. That was all the first tweet said. It is incredibly innocuous and no one could envisage the trail it would blaze across the world as Twitter was taken up in the hands of presidents and global celebrities, revolutionaries and the journalists who have told their stories.

Twitter, like just a few other key internet services such as Google, YouTube and Facebook to name three, has had a massive impact on our world and changed it fundamentally in the ways we interact with it and learn about it.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent his co-workers Tweet on March 21 2006 and five years later billions of 140-character tweets have been sent.

From there the numbers have slowly started to go stratospheric boosted in recent months by upheavals in the Middle East and tragedy in Japan as more than 200 million of us now use it with hundreds of thousands signing up each day (full bunch of Twitter stats at the bottom).

1. The tweeting presidential campaign

It was the Barack Obama presidential campaign that embraced the online world like no other. His campaign used Twitter to connect, reach out and organise. Its use of online and social media laid the foundations for political campaigns to come.

Okay so @BarackObama maybe didn’t do all his own tweets, but he always had a Blackberry in his hands and on winning the presidential race he tweeted a thank you message to his supporters:

“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion. All of this happened because of you. Thanks”.

That was the first thank you sent by a US president and it is a baton that has been picked up by politicians around the world.

2. Journalism

It is incredible to see how much Twitter has changed journalism. Its debut gave a power up, a speed booster if you will, to digital journalism that took it beyond the rolling news of the web to the real time and the instant.

A story can be broken seconds after it has happened in 140 characters or less laying the foundations of a larger story. Not a coincidence that the tweet is similar in length to a “nib” or a news brief. It is in structure no different to the most basic piece of journalism.

Twitter has become the de facto breaking news platform for journalism both for journalists to break it themselves and to monitor and get wind of events that might be happening a mile away or half way around the world.

Its power as a breaking news platform has also been enhance and driven by the fact that it makes citizen journalists of many of its users. Sometimes that might be for just one day as was the case in January 2009 when the US Airways flight crashed in the Hudson River off New York City.

The picture taken by tourist Janis Krums on his iPhone was uploaded to Twitter via Twitpic with the caption: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

That picture was then flashed around the world. It was the first time a tweeted picture splashed on websites and newspaper front pages around the world.

3. Celebrities

Like journalism the life of celebrities and those who follow and report them has also changed quite radically.

Twitter is a digital loud haler and celebrities have taken it up with abandon and in ways that many could not have foreseen. They have delighted some and shocked others.  There have been Twitter affairs and Twitter break-ups. Not to mention celebrities taking pictures of themselves in ways we never expected (or wanted) like Demi Moore’s tweeted arse.

Celebrities for immemorial have spoken to the world via intermediaries whether it is the media or publicists, but with the arrival of Twitter many began speaking directly to their fans and the world.

Many have taken to it with abandon sending forth a stream of consciousness that is soaked up by their followers and then increasingly repeated by a celeb hungry media as news.

In February 2009 Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift. This became a major celeb news story. Not because of anything that befell him, but because he tweeted about it to his 100,000 followers.

“Ok. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle”.

He created more acres of column inches as he said he was quitting Twitter and then unquitting and then quitting again. The story about his plans to leave Twitter in a huff made it to the New York Times not to mention the front page of The Sunday Times.

There was the great race to one million Twitter fans that was won by Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk). Two years later that race to one million followers did not take a couple months or weeks, but was done in a single day by Charlie Sheen.

A million Twitter followers is ancient history and small beer. Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) has more than 8,8 million followers and Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) more than 8. 2 million followers.

4. The 2011 Twitter revolutions

We’ve had protesters on Twitter before, such as the anti-tuition fee #demo2o10, eand seen its use by political groups is well documented, but the upheavals in the middle east showed how Twitter (and other social media) could provide a platform to help enable great social change.

There is much debate over how much of an impact Twitter and social media has had, and Malcolm Gladwell’s voice has been well heard, but for many its impact in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya is hard to deny.

Google and Twitter worked together to make sure that the voices of Egyptians on the streets are heard around the world despite an internet crackdown.

While the number of people signing up to Twitter went up exponentially as the story in Egypt played out.

Twitter was playing a huge role with people getting images of violence out to the outside world and into the hands of journalists and the wider public. Its role as one put has been to “bear witness” to the changes taking place.

While China responded to the upheaval in the middle east by blocking searches for the word “Egypt” on the country’s various Twitter clones.

5. Real Time social media

Twitter has become one of the main planks of social media. It is a must have in some way shape or form.  There are few conversations or presentations about social media that do not contain the words Facebook and Twitter. For good reason.

Twitter has become the platform that allows us as individuals/brands and businesses to build networks of social connections with friends, associates, brands and celebrities.

And more than any other social media technology Twitter has given us real-time. It has turned social media into a conversation allowing the kind of interaction that before we could only get via a phone call or face to face.

That real-time mechanic allows us all to tap the wisdom of half a dozen, a hundred or a thousand people helping us solve problems, resolve issues or simply learn something new.

What it also brings us is its global reach in allows us to listen and respond as the global community to expresses itself.

Whether that is the tragedy in Japan, the uprising in Egypt, the delayed flight at LAX or the traffic build up across town.

Happy birthday Twitter. Some good examples of how brands have used it and other Twitter mile stones on Brand Republic.

#tweets by numbers

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

#employees

• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.