Twitter hit  a new milestone yesterday – 20 billion tweets.

According to Mashable, the milestone comes just two months after the service hit 15 billion tweets and about five months since it reached 10 billion, indicating that activity levels on the microblogging service continue to accelerate.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with the view that Twitter is now a mainstream online channel of communication that’s expanded around the world. It’s a compelling means of conversation between friends for many of the 100 million Twitter users, a view borne out in a recent survey by the 360i agency (which also suggests that marketers don’t get Twitter yet).

More people are developing  value-added services to enhance your experience of Twitter, whether aimed at an individual tweeter or for a company looking to make connections for its brands.

Twitter itself has developed additional features including discovering who to follow, finding good deals on Twitter, and improving secure sign-in.

But along with such extraordinary growth comes capacity and other problems leading to service unreliability and unavailability from time to time.

When you have big plans, you can’t have unreliability if you want to succeed with those plans.

As I write this, Twitter is offline for planned maintenance. A big task, it seems, as the maintenance windows is five hours and began at 7am UK time this morning. That’s five hours where Twitter won’t be available at some point during that time for 100 million people.

As Twitter’s wholesome graphic on the home page currently says, it’s cool, I can chill. I imagine this maintenance will help Twitter fix recent frustrating issues and will prepare Twitter for the next wave in its development.

Twitter is part of our landscapes.

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