31 July 2010 Last updated at 19:03 ET

Twitter user sends world's 20 billionth tweet

The user who posted the landmark tweet was inundated with congratulations

Twitter, the social networking site which lets users say something in up to 140 characters, has had its 20 billionth message posted.

The landmark and rather opaque tweet was sent at 1544 GMT Saturday by GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, a Tokyo graphic designer for an advertising agency.

It said: "So that means the barrage might come back later all at once."

Twitter took four years to reach its 10 billionth tweet, in March this year, and less than five months to double it.

GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world for hitting the milestone with a tweet which appeared to have been part of a longer conversation with another user.

He later posted another message, saying: "Looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet. I'm getting replies from people all over the world. It's scary. What are the chances? Maybe I'm going to die.

"Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke."

The self-declared fan of Tokyo Yakult Swallows baseball team also warned any would-be followers that he tweets a lot about the sport.

The Japanese send nearly 8m tweets a day, about 12% of the global total and second only to the US, according to the San Francisco-based micro-blogging service.

Evan Williams, Twitter's 38-year-old chief executive, travelled to Tokyo last month to celebrate the service's success in Japan.

Twitter is expected this year to open its first dedicated data centre, in the US state of Utah.

The company hopes the data centre will help prevent service overloads, which have been a particular problem during major sporting events like the recent football World Cup.