Twitter reaches 20 billion tweets

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Twitter’s 20-billionth message was sent by a user in Japan, where usage has soared over the last year, providing a glimpse into the service’s exploding popularity around the world.

The giddy graphic designer -- with a passion for baseball and the handle ‘GGGGGGo_Lets_Go’ -- who sent the tweet was flooded with congratulatory tweets. (Check out the Guardian for the translation).

The San Francisco company estimates Japanese send nearly 8 million tweets a day, about 12% of all tweets worldwide. About 16% of Internet users in Japan use the service, eclipsing the number of Internet users in the United States. Twitter users in Japan set their own world record when Japan beat Denmark in the World Cup, sending 3,283 tweets per second. Twitter launched a Japanese-language version in 2008 and a mobile website in October.

It took four years for Twitter to log 10 billion messages; that milestone was reached in March. It took less than five months to double that.

-- Jessica Guynn