Twitter hits 50 million tweets per day and passes MySpace

The leap to 50 million tweets per day, or 600 tweets per second, which does not include spam, shows the huge growth the service has notched up in the space of three years.

In 2007 Twitter users were racking up just 5,000 tweets a day. By 2008 that figure had grown to 300,000 and to 2.5 million per day in 2009. Last year proved to be the microblogging service's breakthrough year growing to 35 million representing an annual growth rate of 1,400 per cent.

The growth in tweets has put Twitter ahead of MySpace which is estimated to be hitting about 33 million status messages per day. In January 51.6 million unique users visited MySpace in the US, according to Nielsen, compared to 21.79 million unique users that visited Twitter. The data suggests that while Twitter has an overall lower number of users they are more communicative.

However, Twitter is still a long way behind social networking leaders YouTube and Facebook. YouTube is estimated to be serving as many as 1 billion videos per day.

In January, Costolo, chief operating officer at Twitter, said the service is ready to begin testing a new advertising platform shortly as he ruled out a stockmarket launch this year.