Twitter says users send 1 billion tweets per week

Five years after the very first tweet, Twitter celebrated its (almost) birthday by sharing some numbers about the microblogging service’s still-impressive growth.

The big number is the one in the headline: Twitter says its users now send one billion tweets in the space of one week. In contrast, it took the company three years, two months, and one day after Twitter creator Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet (on March 21, 2006) to reach its first billion tweets. And it seems like the rate is accelerating — the company previously said its users sent 25 billion tweets in all of 2010.

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You can see the full list of stats at the Twitter blog post, but here are a few other highlights:

• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day in the last month.
• 6,939. Current Tweets per second record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.
• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

Beyond the numbers, Dorsey has been tweeting about his memories of the company’s early days.