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What Are You Doing? Wishing Twitter a Happy 5th B-Day!
"What are you doing?" That's pretty much the question that has launch a bazilliondy Tweets, ranging from real-time firsthand accounts of social upheaval, to celeb inanity, to some of the most "profound" navel-gazing ever (or not) imaginable. Today, the social media site Twitter is celebrating their 5th birthday, and they are doing a few things to mark the occasion.
Part of the celebration is the launch of a new website and video feature called discover.twitter.com, points out Mashable. Links from Twitter employees are going out to connect users to the site, which "features 16 different users from a variety of backgrounds, including entertainment, political, business and even astronautics." It's a diverse list of brains, beauty, brawn, and beats; you'll recognize a couple of people on their list we've talked about Tweeting lately, like tennis star Serena Williams and rapper Snoop Dogg. All 16 of the selected users are part of a YouTube video in which they "discuss who they follow and what value Twitter brings their lives." (Snoop, by the way, follows @MarthaStewart because, like him, the domestic diva likes to "wake and bake.")
Just how much has the little birdy who could grown since 2006? Co-Founder Biz Stone breaks down usage in the Twitter blog:
Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day.
Incidentally, Twitter now happens to have a valued worth of $7.7 billion, which shows a remarkable leap in worth from not only five years ago, but even their last estimated valuation, which was done in January.
Around our part of the interwebs, we definitely value Twitter, and find an increasing number of our readers are coming to our posts from the Tweeted links we sent out. We run a handful of LAist Twitter accounts: Our primary one at @LAist, plus our two genre-specific ones, @LAistFood and @LAistSports.
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Happy Birthday, Twitter!
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