Pretty impressive. In September, it was at 12.5 billion pageviews per month, according to Quantcast data. Back then, Pingdom put out some other stats: 434 posts per second, 26,000 posts per minute, 1.56 million posts per hour, 263 million posts per week, 1.1 billion posts per month, 13.7 billion posts per year.

It’s probably safe to assume that these have gone up as well.

Tumblr’s newly released numbers highlight the significance of some other stats the company shared on Friday, regarding SOPA protests:

That’s probably why Tumblr, via its staff blog, just announced that it’s increased the size limit for these to 1MB. Previously, the limit was 500KB.

Animated GIFs have been around about as long as I’ve been using the Internet, if not longer. It’s been interesting to see them kind of fade into obscurity only to see them have something of a resurgence thanks to networks like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Tumblr.

Even Conan O’Brien is using them on the Team CoCo Tumblr. So is Comedy Central. It’s interesting to see the big brands adopt this element of web culture.

LOLSlater is a great Tumblr for animated GIFs like this:

Tumblr’s traffic has been on the rise, and we can probably expect the animated GIFs to keep rolling. It looks like iPad traffic in particular has been doing quite well.

Tumblr says it has a bunch of mobile updates coming over the next few weeks.

First, the funding. The NYT reported that Tumblr received an additional $85 million in funding from a number of venture capitalists, including Virgin’s Richard Branson. The $85 million increases Tumblr’s funding amount to $125 million. The reason for Tumblr is receiving all this cash comes from its ever-growing popularity.

In other words, Tumblr gets a lot of pageviews. In fact, according to a report from TechCrunch, Tumblr’s 6.5 billion monthly pageviews are more than Wikipedia’s count, which is at 5.6 billion. TechCrunch’s figures come courtesy of comScore. It should also be noted that Tumblr has more monthly pageviews than Twitter, but Twitter has more unique visitors than Tumblr does. Discussing Tumblr’s popularity, the Times’ article references a Nielsen report, which says, “Tumblr Nearly Tripled its Unique U.S. Audience” and offers the following:

New social networks emerge on a daily basis, creating fresh outlets for consumers and brands alike. Tumblr, which combines elements of blogging and Twitter by letting users post and customize everything from pictures and videos to links and quotes, has grown significantly over the last couple of years to become the 8th largest site in the U.S. Social Networks and Blogs category. An analysis of online buzz by NM Incite shows that Tumblr is also a popular conversation topic, generating an average of 21,280 messages and links
per day to the site during May 2011, spreading critical word-of-mouth fueling its viral growth.

Nielsen’s report also reveals that teenage females are big users of Tumblr’s service, so much so, in fact, female teens are “more represented on Tumblr than on any of the other 9 social networks.”

As many of you are already aware, the female teenager is an attractive demographic if only for the access to their parents’ disposable income and the willingness to spend it. With that in mind, should we expect Tumblr to start rolling out advertisements for Coach purses and Ugg boots? It wouldn’t be surprising.

As it stands, there is no advertising on Tumblr’s service, and some have questioned the service’s business model, especially in the comments of the NYT post. Is Tumblr priming itself for a bidding war for the rights to purchase the service? Or will Tumblr introduce advertising, especially as the service’s growth continues at the exponential rate it currently enjoys?

Let us know what you think.

"Translators will be translating the product itself, not the Tweets. If you go to the settings page on Twitter.com and change your language, you’ll see what we mean," explains product manager Jinen Kamdar. "Crowdsourcing translations isn’t new for us. Since October, 2009, we’ve counted on Twitter users to volunteer as translators and help us localize Twitter. For this launch, we created a completely new system, based on feedback from translators, to improve the translation experience."

"The new Translation Center allows any Twitter user to sign up, choose a language and begin translating immediately," adds Kamdar. "Translators can now help localize twitter.com, mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone and iPad, Twitter for Android, Twitter Help and the Twitter Business Center. We also improved the Center’s search functionality, added phrase tagging, created special translator profiles, enabled commenting on phrases and much more."

Twitter is currently offered in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. The company says the next languages will be Indonesian, Russian and Turkish, and these have been added to the Translation Center.

Details about this new system remain a mystery, but Twitter says it will be better. The company’s support team posted the following tweet (hat tip: The Next Web):

As expected, Twitter announced the launch of "Promoted Accounts" as a new way to monetize the service. They didn’t say when the feature would become available, however. 

The new design of Twitter.com is now available for more people. I’ve got it switched on, and so far I’m liking it for those times I actually use Twitter.com as opposed to some other app to access the service. Twitter wants to see how big of an impact the new design has on user engagement from the site itself. 

Twitter is also shutting down its @earlybird account, which was designed to provide exclusive deals for advertisers. 

The official description is: "How do you use Twitter? We asked dozens of our users that exact question. What resulted from their responses is a series of quirky and inspiring articles. We call them Twitter Tales."

Twitter Tales has 3 sections: life, community, and humor. These may change at some point, but these are the categories that the currently feature stories fall into.

In the life section, one user uses Twitter "as a form of therapy". In community, there is a crowd-sourced account aimed at helping people "avoid pitfalls on their daily commute", and in the humor section, one user provides what Twitter describes as "a witty and honest behind the scenes look into her blog writing".

When Facebook announced its 500 million-user milestone, it also launched a "Stories" app for sharing stories about how people have used Facebook. Twitter Tales certainly echoes that (not to mention Google’s Search Stories).

Twitter users are encouraged to share their own tales by emailing tales@twitter.com.  Twitter Tales is accessible by the Twitter Blog.

Original Article: It appears that Twitter may soon reveal yet another way to suggest users for other users to follow. This time it would come in the form of an actual Twitter account. It has been discovered that there is an account called @twittershoutout, which has not been confirmed by Twitter as being a new product, but was most likely created by the company.

As pointed out by The Next Web, only Twitter itself can apparently create accounts that contain Twitter in their names, which would mean that this must be an official account.

The bio for the account simply says, "Contribute your shoutouts to peeps." This would seem to imply the account would be used as kind of an official "Follow Friday"-type vehicle. Recommendations for interesting people to follow. What remains to be seen is how these recommendations will be reached. Just handpicked by Twitter? Based on something like the resonance algorithm used in Promoted Tweets? I expect we’ll hear more on this from Twitter before too long.

Last week, Twitter launched some new user discovery features, aimed at making Twitter more useful to people on a more personalized basis. This appears to simply be another step in that direction.

As Louis Gray points out, the account is also following another account called @twitteronnotice. He speculates that this might be a means of Twitter giving suspect users warning about their accounts.

"With more than a hundred million users on Twitter, there are sure to be at least dozens of accounts out there that will reflect your interests. The trouble is finding all of them," the company says.

Twitter’s suggestions utilize algorithms based on factors like people you follow and the people they follow. The suggestions can be found on Twitter.com and the "Find People" section. Of course you can click "follow" to follow those Twitter suggests for you. If you’re not interested, you can click "hide" and they won’t show you that suggestion again.

Twitter is also launching a feature that shows you "similar" users when you view other people’s accounts. Both new features will be available in third-party apps, as Twitter is launching an API.

If you don’t mind a shameless plug, I might suggest just using Twellow to find people of interest by category or location. If you’re looking to find interesting people to follow, that can help big time, and you can look for people yourself rather than relying on who Twitter thinks you’d be interested in. Mashable included it in its top 20 Sites to Improve Your Twitter Experience as one of two in the discovery category.

Twitter is also growing rapidly, and the company is also talking scaling. This is of particular interest, given that Twitter frequently breaks, and offers up a "fail whale" (or not even that in some cases) instead of a working service.

"As we said last month, we are working on long-term solutions to make Twitter a more reliable and stable platform," says Twitter PR guy Matt Graves. "It’s our number one priority. The bulk of our engineering efforts are currently focused on this issue, and we have moved resources from other projects to focus on it."

Twitter Engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti, who compares the tasks of scaling, maintaining, and tweaking Twitter to building a rocket in mid-flight, says the company has made over 50 optimizations and improvements to its platform. Among these are:

- Doubling the capacity of Twitter’s internal network
- Improving the monitoring of Twitter’s internal network
- Rebalancing the traffic on Twitter’s internal network to redistribute the load
- Doubling the throughput to the database that stores tweets
- Making a number of improvements to the way Twitter uses memcache, improving the speed of Twitter while reducing internal network traffic
- Improving page caching of the front and profile pages, reducing page load time by 80% for some of Twitter’s most popular pages

"While we’re continuously improving the performance, stability and scalability of our infrastructure and core services, there are still times when we run into problems unrelated to Twitter’s capacity," writes Cozzatti.

He’s referring to earlier this week, when Twitter experienced a database problem, which led to users not being able to sign-up, sign-in, or update their profile or background images. There were also problems with the API. He says Twitter has taken steps to detect and respond to such issues more quickly in the future.

To help make Twitter more reliable for the long haul, the company is getting a new data center that will give it more control. They are also looking to hire more engineers, and have 20 positions open.

What question do you have for LeBron James? Tell us.

Earlier this week James joined Twitter and quickly amassed over 300K followers. I guess James saw the power of Twitter, as he’s incorporated the famed microblogging site into the show tonight. You’ll be able to ask him questions tonight via the #lebrondecision hashtag and he’ll answer some during "The Decision".

Our apologies to whomever has the trivial job of screening through the thousands of “sign with my team – MJ is better – you’re no Kobe” kind of Tweets that will surely be sent.

With the mass hysteria surrounding James’ free agency, Twitter was already doomed once he picked a team. Add in the possibility of having a question answered by the King himself and Twitter might as preemptively put up the Fail Whale, because he surely will make an appearance tonight.

Do you think Twitter will be able to handle all  the extra #lebrondecision traffic? Let us know what you think.