Twitter turns 5, but how will it survive?

21.03.2011
As Twitter hits its 5th birthday, industry analysts wonder where the company will go from here.

Twitter is and talked-about Internet companies out there. That's no mean feat for a company that was a fledgling business during a tough economy, and at a time when many major companies were vying for attention and online time.

At just five years old, Twitter users now send more than 140 million 140-characters-or-fewer tweets a day, which adds up to a billion Tweets every eight days, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone .

Stone also noted that while it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, Twitter now adds close to 500,000 accounts every day.

If that's not enough proof has come a long way in a short time, it's increasingly clear that the micro-blogging site is far from a place where people only tweet about their favorite sandwiches or just to hear the digital sound of their own voices.

Just over a week ago, during the recent . It served the same function during the massive earth quakes in Chili as well as .