New stats released today by Twitter reveal that users now send out more than 50 million tweets per day. That means every second, 600 tweets fly through Twitter’s network.

As we reported two weeks ago, Twitter saw more than 1.2 billion tweets in January, or around 39 million tweets per day. These numbers came from Royal Pingdom and not Twitter itself, though.

The new numbers blow past Pingdom’s stats. Some of the highlights:

- In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day.

- By 2008, the number grew to 300,000 tweets per day.

- By 2009, around 2.5 million tweets were sent through Twitter every single day.

- Tweet growth shot up by 1,400% in 2009, reaching 35 million tweets per day by the end of the year.

- As of now, Twitter sees 50 million tweets created per day.

now the only question is how many of the 50 Mio Tweets are:
- Spam
- Retweets
- Twitterfeeds
- relevant?

Two and a half years ago, Charlene Li and I introduced Social Technographics, a way to analyze your market's social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That's because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.

Well, it worked. Despite the rapid pace of technology adoption, the rungs on the ladder have shown steady growth, with some (like Joiners) growing faster than others (like Creators). We have analyzed data for 13 countries, for business buyers, and even for voters. My colleagues and I have done profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors.

In all that time, only one thing has been bugging me: there was no place for Twitter.

We fixed that today.

As you can see from the graphic, we added a new rung, "Conversationalists". Conversationalists reflects two changes. First, it includes not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn't much of a conversation.

Conversationalists intrigue me. They're 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they're among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

The data from this survey continues the trends from the last two years -- Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly.

Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.

Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.

by David Carr

“The business model will be a way that we share money and success, so that our incentives are aligned with partners from  OneRiot to Seesmic to Tweetie to Tweetdeck,” he said on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris today.

Sarver said there are now 50,000 applications built around Twitter. He also announced a developer site and a conference for developers called Chirp early next year.

Filtered by Followers: Twitter Tim.es and MicroPlaza

After you log in with your Twitter username, The Twitter Tim.es creates a page that displays stories by filtering through what the people you follow have tweeted the most. The Twitter Tim.es shows who has posted the story along with a blurb to give you an idea of what it's about. In some cases, the service shows the full text of the post. It also gives you options to view popular stories on Twitter from media sources and Twitter Lists.

MicroPlaza helps you see what's being shared by many people -- both the people you follow and all Twitter users. MicroPlaza puts more emphasis on what people say about the link by prominently displaying their tweets directly below the link and allowing you to easily see all the tweets on the link. This is probably the most flexible filtering tool. You can change how the streams are displayed, see what's most popular today (or this week or this month), even assume the identity of other Twitter users and see what their sources are sharing. MicroPlaza also bookmarks links (though I wish it synced with other bookmarking services).

Curated by Editors: The Hourly Press

Rather than automatically including all of your followers, The Hourly Press enables you to select your own Twitter "editors." Those users are weighted more heavily in the algorithm of what is being shared or cited on Twitter. The Hourly Press then takes the 10 highest scoring links and creates an hourly edition, which is displayed on a customized URL. The Hourly Press I created, for example, is socialjournalism.hourlypress.com. When I want to see what the buzz is, and haven't been on Twitter for a little while, I check this site to see what my trusted sources think are important.

1. The Basics - tell people who you are

It never ceases to amaze me how many people still fail miserably at this first hurdle. When you are setting up your Twitter profile you can set up an avatar/photo, your name, your Twitter username and a 160 character bio. This is so when people visit your Twitter page they can instantly see who you are and what you’re all about. The first thing I do when I’m “followed” by someone on Twitter is look at their profile page to see who they are, what they do and if I think they’re worth following in return.

2. Publicise your Twitter URL whereever you can

3. Don't be vain Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that it’s cool to follow as few people as possible but still expect to have hundreds of followers yourself.

4. The juicy bits - join the conversation

5. Network