UPDATED 10:45 EDT / JULY 01 2011

Twitter Hits 200M Tweets per Day – Obama Jumps on Bandwagon

Twitter has been hit left and right, from the news of their loss of their co-founder to the FTC investigating them.  Isaac “Biz” Stone, co-founder of the microblogging site, recently announced  that he’s leaving the company ,but stated on his blog that he will work with the company “for many years to come.” He goes on to say that the most effective use of his time now is to “get out of the way” of Twitter’s crew and leadership team until he’s called upon to be of some specific use.

Tiwtter’s facing some challenges outside of the boardroom, as it’s also being investigated by the FTC regarding their purchase of TweetDeck.  The FTC is also studying how Twitter deals with outside companies that build applications based on their messaging platform.  But Twitter is still standing.  They just announced that they are now serving as many as 200 million Tweets per day.

According to Twitter, “Every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.”

Two hundred million Tweets per day, you’re probably wondering what people are tweeting about so here are the topics that are popularly trending on Twitter right now:

World Events/ News

  1. AH1N1 – Swine Flu
  2. Mubarak – former Egyptian President
  3. Easter – Christian holiday
  4. Cairo – capital of Egypt
  5. #prayforjapan – sentiment following the March earthquake and tsunami
  6. Chernobyl – site of nuclear disaster in 1986
  7. Libia/Libya – site of an ongoing civil war
  8. Fukushima – Japanese nuclear power plant
  9. William & Kate – Newly-named Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
  10. Gadafi – Libyan political leader

With Twitter having such an overwhelming number of users, it’s not a surprise that President Barrack Obama scheduled a Town Hall meeting on Twitter this coming July 6.  Details are not yet clear as to how the President will select the questions to answer, and if the public will be able to see the questions being submitted.  Using the web as a Town Hall meeting venue is not something new for the President.  Last April 20, Obama held a Town Hall meeting on Facebook.  Former President George W. Bush also used Facebook to launch his book last year.  With such wide use of these social sites, politicians are taking advantage of this broader form of media, and it will not be a surprise if politicians use Twitter or Facebook for their next campaign.

**To catch Obama’s meeting on Twitter, head to http://askobama.twitter.com/, the official Twitter page of the President on July 6, 2 p.m. ET, or 11 a.m. PT.


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