During and after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan this Friday, local phone networks became overloaded. Not just because of damage to infrastructure, but mainly because the networks simply couldn’t handle the flood of calls and text messages that followed.

This kind of overload is basically what happens around midnight at New Year’s Eve, only much worse, because everyone was worried about family and friends and wanted information as soon as possible.

Internet connections, however, continued to work for the most part, so people turned to social media instead.

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Twitter announced yesterday that they now have more than 145 million registered users. That’s a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used? Turns out that there’s more activity on Twitter than ever before, and it keeps increasing.

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

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Back in December 2009, the number of tweets per month on Twitter reached 1 billion for the first time. Now in May, we reached yet another milestone: 2 billion tweets per month (or to be precise, 1.99 billion, which is close enough).

We actually called that this would happen at this exact point in time, based on a prediction we’d made for Twitter’s “tweet growth” in 2010 a while back.

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Twitter processed 1.76 billion tweets in April. This is already significantly more than Twitter was handling in January (1.2 billion tweets). Counted in tweets, Twitter is growing like crazy.

So how many tweets will Twitter be handling by the end of the year? Based on Twitter’s growth rate until now, let’s try to predict what the rest of the year will look like (and make a pretty chart while we’re at it).

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When a big website goes down it doesn’t take long before Twitter is full of tweets lamenting that it’s down. This behavior is so common that even Twitter itself has “is down” as one of its query tips on the Twitter Search page.

Now that Google has added a Twitter timeline graph to its search engine, we can actually visualize how much people complain on Twitter when big sites go down. We can now see how the amount “down tweets” blow up. Finally we have some history to go with real-time search, so we should be grateful that Google got access to Twitter’s firehose.

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Over the past few months there has been plenty of speculation around the Web that Twitter’s growth has stalled, but if we look at activity on Twitter in terms of the number of tweets, this is far from the truth.

According to our research, Twitter is as of December processing more than one billion tweets per month. January passed 1.2 billion, averaging almost 40 million tweets per day. This is significantly more than Twitter was processing just a few months ago.

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The launch of the social news site Digg in 2004 was the perfect example of a good idea at the right time. That was the year the term “Web 2.0″ started being thrown about to describe the rise of new web technologies that allowed for more interactive sites, and an increased focus on user collaboration. Back then, the notion of a news site that was driven almost entirely by users was completely new and innovative, and Digg quickly rose in popularity. It sparked the rise of many similar social news sites, and was also the beginning of founder Kevin Rose’s move from television personality to web entrepreneur.

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There’s been talk about Twitter being the “pulse of the web”, and there is no doubt that the real-time web and real-time search are burning hot trends. At the heart of Twitter are its status messages, more commonly known as tweets, where people express opinions, share links and let people know what they are doing. Tweets are like the vital red blood cells in Twitter’s stream of information.

So how many tweets are pulsing through Twitter every day? When do we tweet the most? Read on to find out.

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In this post Twitter enthusiast Garin Kilpatrick shares his tips on effective ways to get more followers.

It is hard to put a price on a Twitter follower but the host of The Price is Right, Drew Carey, is offering to donate $1 to cancer research for every new follower he receives this year. The following eight tips will enable you to make the most out of your tweets and help you connect with as many followers as possible.

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Yesterday we announced that you can now get Pingdom alerts via Twitter.

So how do you activate those alerts? We have made it very easy for you:

1. Add your Twitter username to your contact(s).
2. Select “Twitter” as notification method when editing/adding a site for monitoring.

Alerts via Twitter is an excellent complement to email and SMS alerts. It’s yet another way you can get alerted by Pingdom when your websites or servers go down.

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