A swallow makes spring. For 6 years now, the new season has been announced not only by the mild climate, but also by the virtual chirping of Twitter which accompanies the real ones of the millions of festive birds. It was in fact March 21, 2006 when the first tweet appeared: with the message "just setting up my twttr" a still unaware Jack Dorsey (@Jack) started what, although not a social network properly speaking, would have climbed the peaks of the highest mountains on the net within a few years, going to challenge big names like Facebook.
Twitter celebrates its first 6 years of life with interesting numbers and above all with the awareness of not only being a social platform but also a real information tool, increasingly used by the press and by the most well-known personalities on the planet to convey news and opinions. From the American president Barack Obama with his 14 million followers to the Dalai Lama, from the queen of the web Lady Gaga (21 million fans) to the soccer players Cristiano Ronaldo and Kakà. In Italy the favorites are Jovanotti and Valentino Rossi, but the most followed sportsman is the Inter footballer Diego Forlan with 2,5 million admirers, while by now half of the Italian parliamentarians have a Twitter account: the most active are Di Pietro and I sell it.
Just a month ago it was calculated that the microblogging site, as it is also referred to, has exceeded 500 million users worldwide, with a daily average of 13,7 new users per second which is propelling it into second place among competing sites, behind Facebook's 900 million subscribers. At this rate, within a year there could be a draw, provided that Mark Zuckerberg's social network does not continue to grow dramatically too. Which is not the case though Google Plus and LinkedIn, already clearly surpassed by the most famous finch on the web.
Another characteristic of Twitter is the speed and immediacy of its use: on average, users spend just 21 minutes on the site a month. Just enough time to take a look or write a quick tweet. It is the new frontier of communication: from the hours spent on Facebook, with the possibility of writing infinitely long messages, Twitter best interprets the hit and run of everyday life. All in 140 characters, all in seconds. With the interesting variant of having quickly become a news aggregator: this is demonstrated by the peaks of tweets coming in real time from the areas of the world of interest. One data above all concerns Japan a year ago: following the Fukushima earthquake, 6.939 messages were recorded per second, a quantity and a pace not sustainable even by the most advanced information agency. Or, for example, the news of Michael Jackson's death in 2009 spread like wildfire with 465 tweets per second.
However, Twitter still has a mission to accomplish: gain effective credibility in its new role as an information vehicle. Indeed, according to a recent research, only 9% of adults believe that blue chirping is a valid information tool.
