Twitter hits 50 million tweets per day mark

Twitter has hit the 50 million tweets per day mark to pass MySpace’s daily status message updates for the first time.

The microblogging service is getting 20 times more traffic than it was experiencing this time last year, with 600 tweets per second, not including spam, according to reports.

In 2007, Twitter posted just 5,000 tweets per day.  By 2008, the number had risen to 300,000.  However, last year the site posted 35 million tweets per day, which represents and annual growth rate of 1400%.

MySpace, meanwhile, records around 33 million status update messages per day – (around 51.6 million unique users visited MySpace in the US last month, while 21.79 million users visited Twitter, according to Nielsen).

The new results are good news for Twitter, showing that its users are communicating more than ever.  However, the microblogging service still sits a fair behind the market leaders YouTube and Facebook.

YouTube is thought to be showing as many as 1 billion videos a day, while Facebook serves up to 1.2 million photos per second and delivers 1 billion chat messages a day.

comScore data shows that 21.79 unique users visited twitter.com in January, which is a 9% month on month increase and an all time high for the site.

Last week, it was reported that Twitter is starting to prove popular among younger users, particularly with under 24-years-old, which has helped to boost its figures.

These figures support The Nielsen Company’s recent report, which shows that the amount of time spent on social networking sites by consumers worldwide was up by 82% year on year in December 2009.

Global consumers spent an average of five hours, 35 minutes and five seconds on social networking sites in December 2009, up from three hours, three minutes and 54 seconds a year previously.

In addition, unique audience was up 27% to 307.4 million in December 2009.