The world’s most beloved social networking/microblogging platform Twitter is 4 years old today on March 21, 2010. Today it’s been exactly 4 years since the cofounder of Twitter Jack Dorsey (@jack) posted his first Tweet in 2006 along with co-founders Evan Williams (@ev) and Biz Stone (@biz) and marked a phenomenon that has caught the imagination of everyone from tech mommies to cable news networks, and sports and Hollywood stars.

A blueprint sketch, 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network.

“Twitter began in a daylong brainstorming session that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo in an attempt to break a creative slump,” informs Wikipedia. It was in this meeting that Jack Dorsey floated the idea of being able to communicate with small groups by means of an SMS service, partially inspired by TXTMob group SMS service.

“The working name was just "Status" for a while. It actually didn’t have a name. We were trying to name it, and mobile was a big aspect of the product early on ... We liked the SMS aspect, and how you could update from anywhere and receive from anywhere. We wanted to capture that in the name—we wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word "twitch," because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves. But "twitch" is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was,” said Jack Dorsey in a Feb 2009 interview with the LA Times.

Last month Twitter reached a whopping 50 million tweets per day. The growth has been staggering for the microblogging site with 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, 300,000 tweets per day in 2008, and around 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009 according to the Royal Pingdom stats. The stats show that 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.

Traffic congratulates Twitter on its staggering growth over just 4 years and wishes Twitter a very happy birthday!