Five years ago today (July 15th) a new social network was launched to the public – Twitter, which was originally called Twttr.

Biz Stone made the first announcement on July 13, 2006 and they were calling it “present tense blogging” and describing it as a way to strip down blogging. Twitter has now grown into something I am sure no one ever saw coming.

In celebration of reaching the 5 year mark, Twitter has been tweeting some fun statistics:

“There were 224 Tweets sent on July 15, 2006. Today, users send that many Tweets in less than a tenth of a second.”

“Yesterday, we saw more than 600,000 signups. It took us more than *16 months* to reach the first 600,000 Twitter accounts.”

Twitter’s major turning point comes back to the SXSW festival in Austin, TX in 2007. They went from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000. And now on July 15, 2011 Twitter can celebrate because of events like President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall, reaching 1 million Twitter apps and the phenomenal 200 million tweets a day mark.

Happy Birthday Twitter. Do you remember when your first tweet was?