Is Twitter too big for its own good?

Twitter has received its 20 billionth tweet over the weekend raising questions about the information overload that is the micro-blogging service.

The message didn’t make much sense – it came at 12:44 am Sunday from user GGGGGGo_Lets_Go in Japan and was part of a longer conversation between two users.

It didn’t take long before GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world for hitting the social networking milestone. The user bio changed shortly thereafter.

While it took Twitter four years to reach tweet number 10 billion earlier this year in March, it took less than five months to double the figure thanks to its increasing popularity worldwide.

My question is, with all these tweets, doesn’t the intended message often become lost?

When I log in to Twitter I am inundated with updates and the information I could actually use are often lost or trumped by something else. How do you achieve stand out on Twitter?

The bigger Twitter becomes, the less valuable it becomes to advertisers because there is no way to target somebody and reach them among the other 1,000 people they are following. Furthermore, there is actually no way to do it in an honest way.

The launch of Promotional Tweets was risky for several reasons.

Firstly, the monetization of social media platforms, while inevitable, goes against the very attributes that made social platforms so compelling in the first place.  People could connect free from advertising and its ulterior motives.

Now, all these tweeters are simply filling up the new feed with spam. Advertising on the site is so vast it is being seen as disingenuous.

But what do you think? Is Promoted Tweets working?

Meanwhile, here are some other Twitter figures to celebrate the 20 billionth tweet:

* Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
* New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
* 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
* 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (via third party applications.)
* Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
* Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
* Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
* Of Twitter’s active users, 37% use their phone to tweet.
* Over half of all tweets (60%) come from third party applications.
* Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.