US utility patents granted

Daily Twitter volume and US utility patents granted, both climbing for fifteen years. Two completely independent forms of recorded human output, sharing a window of compounding production. One is, broadly, defended in courts; the other is, broadly, regretted at 3am.

Tweets per day grew from about 50 million in 2008 to over 500 million by 2022 as Twitter scaled its user base. US utility patents grew from about 185,000 in 2008 to over 350,000 by 2022 as software, biotech, and Chinese-applicant filings expanded the corpus. Two completely unrelated output lines sharing a window because the same fourteen years scaled both a global posting platform and a global innovation-filing system.

More tweets, more patents. The decade was busy with paperwork of all kinds.