Birthday Twittering - are you Twittering yet?

Do you know how old Twitter is? Well you may or may not care, but I was surprised to read that Twitter turned 5 last Monday. Why it doesn't seem to be that old is because Twitter has had a growth spurt in the last 12 months with many people only just opening Twitter accounts recently. I've had an account for ages, but took ages to recognise its worth. I use it more and more each day. It works great with other social networking sites. For example, the A - Z challenge people have been twittering away on #atozchallenge for ages. Want news of the challenge? Go there.I think #hashtags are one of the best things about Twitter.

Here are some Twitter milestones:

• it took 18 months for Twitter to go from its first tweet (characteristically short, with poor spelling and no punctuation: "just setting up my twttr" sent by co-founder Jack Dorsey,) to get to 500,000 users.
• today, 500,000 new accounts are registered daily
• it took over 3 years to get to the billionth tweet, now a billion tweets are sent every eight days

Twitter has caused individuals to lose their jobs because of tweets deemed controversial by their employers.

It has added words and phrases to our language - "fail whale" when Twitter crashes (no wonder with that many messages happening!), plus "to follow", "to unfollow", "to tweet", "to retweet", and of course to be a bit of a "Twit," but I've been using that one forever.

The New York Times has been trying to shut down a registered user of Twitter. Why? After the NYTimes announced the details of its paywall, letting readers know how much they'd pay to read articles online, holes were punched in the wall by a new Twitter account. @FreeNYTimes vowed to tweet every link to every story in the paper for free. Trouble is, if the NYTimes is successful in shutting down "@Free..." new accounts are sure to open hourly which is a terrible shame. The newspaper must need the money honey.