Twitter hits 5 billion tweets

Former Current Media executive Robin Sloan appears to have posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet, in the form of a reply to another user that otherwise read only "Oh lord."

A third-party app called Gigatweet has been measuring the service's total tweet count for some time now, and last week some onlookers picked up on the fact that it was getting awfully close to five billion. That said, Twitter's engineers have bumped up this number at least once or twice, and who knows how many test tweets were sent out in the company's early days.

But Sloan's tweet, which he has nicknamed "The Pentagigatweet," does get at least some landmark status because it actually has the number 5,000,000,000 in the URL. That's because the number at the end of a tweet's URL is apparently the running count of tweets that have been posted until that point. We've e-mailed Twitter co-founder Biz Stone for more information and will update if and when we hear back.

The guy who posted Twitter's 5 billionth tweet.

(Credit: Robin Sloan's Facebook profile)

It's sort of fitting that Twitter's 5 billionth tweet came not from one of the celebrities or marketers who have flooded the service in recent months, but from one of the quirky Bay Area dot-com nerds who formed its first loyal pack of users.

Sloan, who lives in San Francisco, recently departed his gig at Current--which is headquartered only a few blocks away from Twitter's own home base in the South of Market neighborhood--to write a still unnamed novel" that he is funding through creative-microfinance site Kickstarter.

He may have just gotten a convenient leg up in publicity.

Meanwhile, some third-party observers have been remarking that Twitter's rapid growth may be slowing down. The company recently raised another round of funding at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion.

This post was expanded at 10:20 p.m PDT.

Correction at 2:25 p.m. PDT Tuesday: This post initially referenced an incorrect title for the novel Sloan is working on. The novel is still unnamed.

[AppleSuxLeo]

I`m Twittering on the porch.
Five billion ways to waste the bandwidth of the net.

[rolodexter]

LOL It's all about as significant as #balloon boy

[monoclemonkey]

just as inane as the 4,999,999,999 before it

[breadiu]

Are you sure that a tweet ID of 5000000000 means that it was the 5 billionth tweet?

Twitter has twice made publicly announced changes to their tweet numbering scheme, increasing it both times [1][2]. Wouldn't this mean that a tweet with a status ID of 5000000000 is obviously not be the 5 billionth tweet?

In addition, Sloan was not someone "who formed its first loyal pack of users." In fact, his account is only a year and a half old, whereas the earliest adopters have accounts that are over three years old.

This article needs a correction (or two).

As a wise man once said, "Journalism FAIL."

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/1e97063bbf0f71a1/a5fa6bbf02b23264?lnk=gst&q=Twitpocalypse#a5fa6bbf02b23264
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/3614bb896bf6ad3e

[poster48150]

Here's a list of all the worthwhile tweets, to date:

[krosafcheg]

How about a list of all the worthwhile responses to Twitter posts, from people who don't like Twitter? 2 out of 4 so far is pretty good.

[TCrimson05]

...and with each tweet the world dies a litffe more ...

[dataJONBOY]

hate on twitter all you like. we are amassing the largest wholistic dataset ever know. soon, your biological distinctivness will be added to our own. when that happens, all your tweets are belong to us.

[Harrison912]

What ever the number of Tweets, that's why I use it for socially marketing my safety and security web site. It's friggin popular!