November, 2008 – Twitter reaches 1 billion tweets.

October, 2009 – Twitter reaches 5 billion tweets.

Sometime over the next couple of days, Twitter should pass the 10 billion mark, which is an incredible accomplishment in a relatively short period of time.

This is according to data provided by Popacular.com, which tracks all tweets via an almost mesmerising GigaTweet counter.

Last month, we reported how Twitter was now averaging close to 50 million tweets per day. GigaTweet has charts for that, too.

As well as per hour.

In case you’re wondering how they work this out, all tweets are conveniently tagged with their number, which is contained in the URL.

For example, this tweet is number 9,887,809,135.

Who will get tweet 10 billion? Just how many of these tweets are spam or ‘pointless babble’? And how long would it take you to read them all?

More importantly, shouldn’t Twitter really give out some kind of prize?

(Hat tip to Diana Adams, her friend @cheth and Mashable.)

An interesting update over on the official Twitter blog, where analytics lead Kevin Weil looks at the growth of the network over the past three years in terms of numbers of tweets per day.

Kevin notes that all accounts identified as spam have been removed from this data, which makes the results even more impressive.

On a year-by-year basis, Kevin notes that Twitter has grown from just 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, to 35 million in 2009, and 50 million as of January this year.

Twitter has a habit of flat-lining pretty quickly after stellar growth, but given we’ve already seen a 43% rise in daily tweets in just a couple of months, and 200% since July, it doesn’t seem too fantastical to set a target of 100 million tweets per day before the end of the year. That’s 1,200 per second, if you’re counting.

Perhaps less impressively – assuming my estimations of 25 million active and bonafide users are accurate – that’s just four per profile, per day. Which equates to only two per day, at the current levels. If the active user numbers are as high as 75 million as some have suggested, that would mean just 1.33 tweets per day per person to hit the magic hundred. Given I do forty or so per day myself, I’m pretty sure that between us we can cope, even if a bunch of you continue taking a siesta.

Of course, if Twitter would actually release the active user data, that would make crunching these numbers just that little bit easier. All this guesswork is getting just a wee bit tiresome.

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

The moderate rebound we saw across social media in December 2009 continued with additional bluster in January 2010, according to figures released by Compete.com.

Twitter posted visitor growth of +3.35% to 23,573,178 uniques, just marginally short of the August 2009 peaks. More impressively, overall visits were up a heady 13.40% to 151,538,594, again just slightly short of the August highs, but welcome nonetheless.

It’s the biggest month-to-month jump for Twitter since April 2009, and while the amazing growth rates the company saw at the beginning of last year now seem long behind us, it’s encouraging for the platform that existing users appear to be very upbeat. (An attitude which is reflected in other data.) And this is just traffic to Twitter.com, remember, which accounts for perhaps as little as 20% of all traffic.

Facebook also rose, adding +1.13% of new visitors to 133,623,529 uniques, and +5.92% overall (2,872,823,682). This is a new all-time high for Facebook, improving on December’s peaks.

LinkedIn gained +4.01% to 15,475,890 uniques, but an incredible +23.84% overall (64,426,829).

Friendfeed rebounded from a massive four-month decline to edge up +3.42% (499,842 uniques), and +17.25% in all traffic.

Even MySpace turned up at the party, adding +2.61% unique visitors to 50,615,444, and 571,351,604 overall (+3.09%), a number which should clearly not be dismissed.

Plurk, meanwhile, fell -19.21%, registering just 181,096 unique visitors in January.

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

After several months of flat to negative growth, social media saw something of a rebound in December, according to figures released by Compete.com.

Twitter posted a +1.45% gain on unique visitors, to 22,808,321, and 133,636,767 visits overall. This was the first uptick for Twitter since August of this year, and that month remains the network’s peak.

Facebook also saw gains, adding +2.95%, or 132,130,132 unique visits, and 2,712,334,571 overall. This is a new all-time high for Facebook, and followed a dip of almost half a percent in November.

Twitter link aggregator Tweetmeme continued it’s incredible growth, adding +6.89% in December, to 1,268,501 unique visitors, and 3,503,804 overall.

LinkedIn had the best net gain month-to-month, adding +2.84% to 14,879,386 uniques, and 51,215,574 overall, and now closes in on the October highs.

MySpace enjoyed a modest rebound, adding +1.53% uniques to 49,326,638, and a still-impressive 554,221,540 overall.

Even Plurk saw decent growth in December, grabbing back +10.90% of unique visitors, to 224,160, and 824,941 overall.

Meanwhile, Friendfeed lost a sizeable -12.46% of visitors, registering only 483,329 uniques in December, and just over one million overall. Friendfeed has now lost more than half of all visitor traffic since the August 2009 highs, and unless new owners Facebook make a bold attempt to re-energise the flagging aggregator, it seems probable that it won’t be around this time next year.

It’s too early to say if this modest rebound on social media traffic is the start of something more significant, or simply a dead cat bounce. Moreover, as mentioned Compete.com data has a large USA-bias, and does not include usage of Twitter in external clients, such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

Indeed, globally Twitter appears to be zooming in on the peaks seen earlier in the year, and it will be interesting to see if 2010 means the start of another huge uptrend in social media traffic, similar to that witnessed throughout most of 2009.