Twitter Turns Four

The service that began the status update revolution turned four-years-old last month. The US-based micro blogging service started back in 2006, and has since become wildly successful, despite only having taken off into the mainstream in 2008.
Twitter users are creating 50 million messages tweets of 140 characters or less each per day. Kevin Weil, a member of Twitter's analytics team, said in a blog post that Twitter users were writing 5,000 tweets per day in 2007, 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009. "Tweets grew 1,400 per cent last year to 35 million per day," Weil said. "Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day - that's an average of 600 tweets per second." He further added that the 50-million figure doesn't include messages from accounts identified as spam.
In a significant development for millions of deaf internet users, YouTube has extended automatic caption capability to all English-language videos on their video-sharing service. Since 2008, YouTube users have been able to manually add captions to videos, while in 2009, the website began offering machine-generated captions for about a dozen partner channels.
According to Physorg.com, Hereto Tonuses, a YouTube product manager, said in a blog post last month that the automatic caption, or auto-caption feature will now be expanded to all videos (in English) on the website. Auto-captioning uses speech-to-text technology to generate subtitles.