The micro-blogging site Twitter has finally reached its 100th million user milestone (worldwide) which is an 82-percent increase within this year according to the analyst Ovum. The social networking site is all set to add another 26 million by the end of 2011. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July of that year. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity and was termed as the “SMS of the internet.”
Twitter has recently added five new languages to their list in an effort to increase their site’s reach. The Tagalog language is one of the five languages recently included in the list. Being able to translate to Filipino can only be seen as a way for Twitter to continue its stranglehold in the Filipino market. Aside from Tagalog (Filipino), the other four languages were Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Hindi, and Malay.
Since 2010, the Philippines ranked as the 6th largest user of the micro-blogging site Twitter, reports released by comScore, Inc. They are the ones responsible for measuring the digital world.
Filipinos access Twitter commonly through web browsers (computers via internet) and currently the rate of Twitter interactions through the mobile phone has increased. Mobile phones have become a commodity to the Filipino household and personal messaging has been the preferred mode of its use. The rate of mobile phone access to the internet has increased since the release of internet capable mobile devices followed by the outburst growth of social networking sites. Twitter follows Facebook in the most accessed social networking sites by the Pinoys.
Twitter now fully supports 17 languages through their 290,000 (and counting) community of volunteer translators (crowd sourced) who both translate and moderate contents on their site.
