• The Telegraph , Tuesday, October 20, 2009 1:41 PM

The revolution might not be televised, but it most likely will be tweeted. In the wake of new financing and a $1 billion valuation, the micro-blogging service just surpassed 5 billion tweets.

To put that number into perspective, the service only reached its billionth Tweet last November, and was only up to 1.6 billion in April. That means the remaining 3.4 billion Tweets were sent in just six months, which suggests massive growth.

There is some debate about who sent the 5 billianth tweet on Twitter, ut it appears to be one Robin Sloan, a former Current Media executive turned novelist based in the San Franscisco Bay area. What did he say? "Oh lord."

To date, a third-party site called GigaTweet, which has been counting all Tweets for some time, says some 5,018,584,000 tweets have been sent -- a number which is increasing by roughly 300 a second.

It remains to be seen how Twitter will capitalize on its stratospheric rise to fame, but that question will likely be answered sooner rather than later. The company is reportedly in advanced talks with both Microsoft and Google to license its full feed, which could then be integrated into either companies' own search results.

Last month, Facebook's community crossed the 300 million member threshold worldwide, and said it's becoming "cash-flow positive" -- meaning that cash it generates from advertising and other forms of revenue now exceed the cost of servers and other capital expenditures required to keep Facebook running. When Twitter reaches that milestone is anyone's guess.

Read the whole story at The Telegraph »