The 5 billionth tweet: "Oh lord."

Guess that pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

CNET News.com is reporting that Twitter, the ubiquitous microblogging service that's so big that it's now cool to declare that you've deleted your Twitter account, has just achieved an impressive milestone: its 5 billionth tweet.

The author of the two-word, six-character tweet: Robin Sloan, a former cable news executive and budding novelist who resides in San Francisco, according to CNET. And what did Sloan tell the world in his momentous tweet, you ask? "Oh Lord." (Apparently, Sloan was replying to a fellow Twitter user.)

Of course, whether Sloan's tweet was, in fact, the five-billionth tweet is open to debate. CNET made the determination based on the calculations of GigaTweet, a third-party service that's been tracking the total number of tweets, and it's difficult to ignore the "5000000000" in the URL of Sloan's "Oh lord" status message. However, as the Telegraph points out, Twitter has reset its count a couple times in the past, so Sloan's message might not be precisely the 5,000,000,000th tweet ... although it's at least the five billionth.

In any case, let's just say that yes, a lot of people are using Twitter, and as GigaTweet demonstrates, users have recently been firing off north of 50 million tweets a day.

OK, so does this mean (as the Wall Street Journal is telling us) that e-mail is, like, so dead? Well, not for me, it isn't. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer channels of communication that allow for messages longer than 140 characters—and you know, I'm not always in the mood to broadcast my thoughts to the world.

Mark my words: One day soon, e-mail will be the new Twitter. You heard it here first.

Related:
Twitter hits 5 billion tweets [CNET News.com]