“By the end of the year I’ve already promised this, so the engineers – when I promised it publicly they’re already mad at me so they can keep being mad at me,” said Costolo at UM. “Now, again, once again, I caveat this with the engineers who are actually doing the work don’t necessarily agree that they’ll be done by the end of the year, but we’ll just keep having that argument and we’ll see where we end up year-end.”

We'll see.

Other facts from Costolo's talk at the University of Michigan:

“It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion tweets to be sent. From the time the company started in 2006 to mid-2009 three years, two months and one day for the first billion tweets to be sent. It has a nice rhythm that it was three, two, one. It probably wasn’t exactly one day, but we like to say that; so it’s three, two, one,” he said. “We now send a billion tweets every two and a half days. So the volume, the noise level has increased dramatically.”

A billion tweets are sent every two and a half days. How many of those are spam? I'm curious if the ratio is anything like the ratio of email spam to actual emails.

I always wonder why TV shows put a hashtag on the TV during their shows and think "who responds by using a hashtag that a tv show dictates to me?"

When the TV show The X-Factor (U.K.) put a hashtag on the screen, it generated 27,000 tweets in 90 seconds.

I guess that's the answer.

The service will “never change” its 140-character limit.

Never is a long time.

Via @viticci