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Twitter, the immensely popular social networking service which has made tweet synonymous with a short message posted online rather than of a bird chirping , has reached the milestone of 10 billion “tweets”, as announced by the tweets tracking service GigaTweet, which tracks tweets in real time. All this in less than 4 years of inception, it reached 1 billion in November 2008, and 5 billion in November 2009 , twitter sees an average of 50 million messages every day, or 600 per second. Online predictions have started for the 20 billionth tweet, but it seems to be a hard one.

As with the other popular online communication and networking mediums, Twitter was initially started by Jack Dorsey in 2006 to keep in touch with his friends, however, the novel concept of easily and quickly posting short messages caught on making Twitter an extremely popular medium of communication with users all over the world. It served as a powerful communication tool  in the campaign to raise funds for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

Twitter mania has not spared celebrities and popular personalities, from players to coaches, actors to directors, politicians to activists, everyone seem to have embraced it as a medium of communication. According to Telegraph, London beats all other cities is the world with the highest number of Twitter users tweeting from here with Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Steven Gerrard among others are all members of the “twitterati”.

Businesses have embraced Twitter with open arms and are using it as a advertising and brand building platform and Twitter is not shying away either, the company is  seizing upon its status as the Web’s hot spot for brands and marketers and is testing a formal advertising platform.