Twitter hits 155 million tweets per day as mobile use soars by 50%

by @gordonmacmillan, posted on 7 April, 2011 at 8:29 am, filed under Search Engines, Twitter and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

Twitter has been tweeting a number of growth figures. They shed some light on how people are using it. No surprise that much of the growth is coming via mobile and Android is playing a big part of that.

Twitter saw a whopping 104% growth in monthly app users from Android phones. Strong growth from the Apple’s iPad too. There is also news on Twitter search, which is apparently three times faster than before.

I wonder if the people using Twitter on the iPad are actually using it to tweet or to monitor? When I have tried I can not get to grips with that virtual keyboard.

The latest stats follow the news yesterday that Twitter was relaunching its homepage confirming it as a media firm as much as anything else (Twitter becomes a media firm as it unveils new homepage).


Twitter highlights by tweet from @twitterglobalpr

1. Been playing with numbers. Big Q1 for Twitter… 41% increase in Tweets per day. 38% increase in Tweets per day in US.

2. There was a 52% increase in monthly Twitter account signups from December to March — with 57% increase in the US.

3. Mobile growth on Twitter was big. There was a 50% increase in monthly unique mobile signups.

4. Q1 increase in Twitter app monthly users – 104% Android, 72% iPad, 55% iPhone, 51% Blackberry

5. Oh and – not a Q1 stat – but noticed that we’re now at 155 million Tweets per day, up from 55 million at this time last year.

Twitter search three times faster

Twitter says it has been working for the past year on improving its search engine and as part of the effort it launched its new real-time search engine. All of this work has led to the improvements we’re now getting in terms of speed  and other benefits.

“Twitter search is one of the most heavily-trafficked search engines in the world, serving over one billion queries per day. The week before we deployed Blender, the #tsunami in Japan contributed to a significant increase in query load and a related spike in search latencies. Following the launch of Blender, our 95th percentile latencies were reduced by 3x from 800ms to 250ms and CPU load on our front-end servers was cut in half. We now have the capacity to serve 10x the number of requests per machine. This means we can support the same number of requests with fewer servers, reducing our front-end service costs by an order-of-magnitude. “

There is more on this including  all the techie bits on the Twitter Engineering blog.