Twitterstorm: Real-time social network will sign up as many people today as it did in first 16 months

Twitter was by no means a lightning bolt out of the gate. The peculiar, 140-character-based "real-time information network" was a niche on a good day and a straight-up outcast on a bad one.

It took Twitter 16 months, or nearly 500 days, to reach its first 600,000 users. And now? It signed up 600,000 people yesterday alone.

Twitter, who is celebrating its fifth birthday today, also revealed that on July 15th, 2006—its launch day—224 tweets were sent. Today, that many tweets are occurring more often than every tenth of a second, for a total of nearly 300,000,000 per day.

People sure do love their Twitter. In fact, as we noted yesterday, Twitter users average twice as much time online than other web users:

Twitter's constant flow of real-time conversations and news has got people hooked: Twitter users in Canada average  over 33 hours a week online, while their non-Twitter counterparts clock in just 17 hours online weekly, according to a CBC/Radio-Canada and BBM Analytics joint study.

Time spent accessing the internet has tripled for even the casual users: in 1997, weekly online time was less than 5 hours, the study notes.

It's believed that increased smartphone ubiquity, plus the rise of tablets, has triggered the incredible surge in the always-connected mentality of being on the internet around the clock. Even during vacations, many users can't help but some some time online.

Also interesting was that, the more hardcore an internet users one is, the more likely they are to take public transit.