To some degree, it's part of a cofounder's job to act as a corporate cheerleader; a pessimist could hurt his company by scaring people away.  Biz Stone appears to have all but literally grabbed a megaphone and shouted "rah, rah," though, as he predicted that Twitter usage will hit monster levels next year.

A 600-word document written by Stone appeared in the Times Online yesterday, and in it, Stone talked a lot about Twitter's role in the Iranian protests.  He also stressed its importance as a "real-time information network" rather than a site for people to just make friends or talk about their day.

Then Stone shared a couple of predictions.  He wrote, "In the new year, Twitter will begin supporting a billion search queries a day.  We will be delivering several billion tweets per hour to users around the world."

Kim Mai-Cutler responded, "Several billion tweets an hour is astronomical if you consider that there have been roughly 7 billion tweets total so far over the company's three year history.  The number is also an order of magnitude higher than the estimated 27 million tweets a day Twitter supported last month, according to a study from Pingdom."

And it's hard not to remember that Twitter's growth rate hasn't been stellar in recent months.

Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section.  As always, we'll see what happens.

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