Twitter churns out millions of tweets

New numbers from the folks at Twitter show that people are tweeting furiously.

Three years ago, the microblogging company was handling 5,000 tweets a day, according to Kevin Weil, the analytics lead at Twitter. Today, though, that number has gone up, a lot.

Weil noted in a blog post on the Twitter site today that 50 million tweets are posted on the site every day. That's an average of 600 tweets per second. Weil noted that Twitter strips out the spam tweets before calculating the daily totals.

In 2008, the site was managing 300,000 tweets per day. By early 2009, it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew by 1,400% and reached 35 million per day by the end of the year.

Weil, however, doesn't say how many users account for the current 50 million tweets-per-day. Are the top 10% of users, for instance, accounting for 80% of all tweets? That's not clear.

Just last month, a study from RJMetrics showed that the number of Twitter users has climbed to 75 million.

The study also showed that a lot of Twitter accounts are inactive, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December. According to RJMetrics, only 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted in December. That's down from more than 70% in early 2007, when Twitter was a fledgling company with far fewer users.

Twitter, according to the report, has between 10 million and 15 million active tweeters.