The popular microblogging site Twitter - co-founded by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone; and launched in 2006 - turned seven years old on Thursday; and it now boasts 200 million active users who generate more than 400 million tweets every day.

Announcing the 7th birthday for Twitter on Thursday, Twitter said that thousands of tweets - the 140-character messages - are sent from computers, smartphones and tables every minute; with the microblogging site packing news, sports scores, pictures, gossip, complaints of infuriated customers, and hashtags.

To commemorate its 7th birthday, Twitter has put together a video which highlights some of the biggest Twitter events over the last seven years; and, hinting at its immense popularity over these years and its growth potential for the future, it said: "There's an old English saying, "Keep a thing seven years, and you'll always find a use for it"."

Meanwhile, in a noteworthy development for Twitter, co-founders Dorsey and Stone obtained a patent - from the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office, on Tuesday - which covers a messaging system that sounds a lot like the micro-blogging site.

Chiefly pertaining to a mechanism for sending messages to people irrespective of the technology being used by them, the patent says: "While there is some ability to communicate between devices or message types, there are still significant limitations. There is no general method of sending a message to multiple users who may be receiving the same message using different devices or interfaces."