17 Things You Didn’t Know About Twitter

Think you know everything there is to know about Twitter? We bet there are some things that even the most elite Twitter users are in the dark about. Here are 17 facts about Twitter that would probably surprise Biz and Ev themselves!

• Twitter’s 10,000,000,000th tweet (tweeted in March of 2010) was private, so we’ll never know what it said
• The first tweet in the world is traced back to March 21st, 2006:
  
• Twitter was originally created so a small group of people could chat via SMS
• Twitter was originally named “Twttr”, inspired by Flickr
• If you printed out everything that was tweeted on Twitter…
  

  and laid the pages end to end they would stretch 60,763 miles or 2.5 times around the Earth

  the paper would weigh 3.5 million pounds, the equivalent of 82 school buses fully loaded with 84 happily tweeting kids

  and did nothing but read tweets throughout the entire work day it would take 2912 years to get through it

• On January 22nd, TJ Creamer (@Astro_TJ) sent the first tweet from space:
  

  Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space!  More soon, send your ?s

• Shanghai-born Yiying Lu is the creator of the now-infamous Fail Whale
• The @reply feature wasn’t originally supported by Twitter – users started using it, and Twitter eventually made it an official feature
• Twitter users are really philosophers at heart: more than half say they post “humorous or philosophical observations about life in general.”
• Only about 25% of traffic on Twitter actually comes from Twitter.com
• 10% of women online use Twitter, while only 7% of men online do
• From January 2010 to mid-August 2010, new users accounted for about 44% of all Twitter users
• 96% of all Twitter users have fewer than 500 followers
• Twitter (as Twttr) was launched to the public in July 2006
• Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for about 16% of all tweets in a week
• While the US has the most Twitter users as a whole, more Twitter users live outside the US than within it
• The Twitter search engine gets more than 600 million queries per day
  
  Do you know any other interesting Twitter facts? We’d love to hear about them in the comments or on Twitter @alltwtr.   

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