Twitter users hit 50 million tweets a day

The number of tweets grew 1,400 per cent last year

The explosive rise of Twitter was highlighted today with new figures showing that individual tweets have risen from 5,000 a day in 2007 to a whopping 50 million today.

Kevin Weil, analytics head at Twitter, published a chart in a blog post showing the stratospheric growth in tweets over the past few years.

Weil claimed that the extraordinary numbers shown in the chart do not include spam, from which Twitter has suffered badly. Just this week users were warned of a new phishing scam delivered via fake tweets.

"Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400 per cent last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day. That's an average of 600 tweets per second," he said.

This is the first in a number of statistical reports that Twitter plans to release, and Weil promised that more would follow soon.

"Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because, once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network," he wrote.

"Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned."