Twitter began it’s life way back in 2006, the very same year facebook was born. Ever since then these two social networking giants have been battling against each other. Both Twitter and Facebook are now among the world’s social media ‘big boys’.

In November 2008 Twitter reached a milestone of 1 billion tweets. Then, less than a year later in October 2009, the 5 billion tweet barrier was broken.

Now just over 4 months later tweets have doubled, launching the platform towards the 10 billion tweets milestone.

While these statistics are impressive (and watching the total number of tweets increase on GigaTweet really puts things in perspective), my concern is this…Could this huge number of tweets be due to the increasing amount of automated content on the platform?

Ever since twitter opened it’s API, accounts have been popping up all over the place tweeting clearly automated material, turning many accounts into a spam-haters nightmare. Nowadays it wouldn’t be a surprise to come across an automated account that posts a tweet every time the account owner blinks!

While automated tweets aren’t necessarily less important or informative, I feel it takes away the ‘social’ aspect of the platform. I believe that, when considering the question ‘to automate or not to automate’, you really have to consider what your audience will listen to more; an automated robot or a warm, friendly person.

Regardless of whether tweets are automated or human controlled, people are still choosing to post a vast amount of content to twitter, content that perhaps would be lost in other social networks like Facebook. In this respect, twitter really has excelled and is likely to continue to do so.

The total number of tweets is expected to reach 10 billion some time around the early hours of Friday 3^rd March. Next up – 20 billion by August? Now there’s a target for all those who tweet!