How much did you tweet today? Twice? A dozen? Well, someone is apparently making good use of the micro-blogging site because Twitter on Thursday revealed that it is now handling 200 million tweets per day.
That's up from 2 million tweets per day in January 2009 and 65 million per day in June 2010, Twitter said in a blog post.
"For perspective, every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace," the company wrote. "Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan's Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world."
Twitter celebrated its five-year anniversary in March, at which time it said it was sending a very appropriate average of 140 million tweets per day. Twitter also revealed that it took three years, two months, and one day to get to its first billionth tweet. Now, Twitter users send one billion tweets every five days, the company said today.
What on earth are people talking about? For the first half of 2011, the most popular topic in terms of world news was AH1N1, or swine flu, while the most talked-about pop culture figure was Rebecca Black of "Friday" fame.
Many of the popular news-related trending topics this year discussed the uprisings in the Middle East and the Japan earthquake. After swine flu, the top-five most popular terms were Mubarak, Easter, Cairo, and #prayforjapan. Rounding out the top 10 were Chernobyl, Libia/Libya, Fukishima, William & Kate, and Gadafi.
On the pop culture front, Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen saw their share of tweets. "Femme Fatale," the title of Spears' latest album, was the number-two most popular trending topic, while Sheen came in third, followed by his #tigerblood catchphrase. Rapper Nate Dogg, who passed away in March, was in the number-five spot.
Also making the list was Brazilian mixed martial artist Anderson Silva, Tom & Jerry, British band Mumford & Sons, as well as the terms "Bieber alert" and "Queen Gaga."