Twitter 2010: The year Twitter grew

Twitter had an extremely good year in 2010. In four years the microblogging site has gone from niche to mainstream.  It’s difficult these days to find a website that doesn’t have a Twitter linking badge or watch a TV show which doesn't mention the social site.

Lets look back at the year that was for Twitter.

In 2010, Twitter had on average 213.4 million visitors a month and 26 million unique visits, making it the 10th most visited site on the web. By the end of the year, they are projected to have sent over 29 billion tweets and have 90 million tweets a day. 

Over the course of the year, such influential people as Bill Gates, Dalai Lama, Hugo Chávez, Kanye West, Tiger Woods and Donald Rumsfeld have joined the site. British Petroleum used the site to communicate the oil spill efforts and Wyclef Jean used Twitter to raise money for Haiti. 

One of the main complaints with the site has been its limitations. The site has grown and flourished thanks to third party apps. This year Twitter changed all that. They kicked things off with their geolocation project called @Anywhere. That was quickly followed up with official apps for the Blackberry, iPhone and Android phones and the iPad. 

Twitter didn't finish there! Next, they focused on improving the built in features, with features such as “Reply to All,” “Who to Follow” and “Auto completion” added, as well as a whole new interface, introduced to praise and condemn. Finally, they started rolling out profile analytics.

In the course of a year, Twitter has had incredible growth, undercut the third party apps that built their business model on Twitter and got into a bidding war that raised its value to $4 billion. Not bad for a company that just a year ago seemed to be drifting with no real business plan. 

Where do you see Twitter going in 2011?

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