To those of you who tweet and follow others on Twitter all the livelong day, the co-founder of the immensely popular social networking site has a message for you.

Stop it!

Christopher Isaac (Biz) Stone says some people admit to logging onto Twitter for 12 hours straight.

Stone said that sounds unhealthy to him.

He said he'd prefer people visit the site frequently rather than sacrifice their lives to it.

Stone told a Montreal business audience Wednesday that even he is amazed at the reach of the website, which he said that he and his partner Evan Williams figured would never be used for anything other than a little fun.

"Nobody thought it was a good idea," Stone recalled of Twitter's early days. The biggest critique of Twitter was Twitter was not useful.

"And I distinctly remember my colleague Evan Williams saying, 'Well, neither is ice cream. Should we ban ice cream and all joy or can we have something that's just fun? What's wrong with that?'"

He said they then just focused on having fun and building the social media tool.

Stone said he started to realize its impact when he was attending a seminar at an Austin, Texas, conference in 2007 and suddenly big groups of people got up and left the room.

"It was as if the PA system had announced everyone should leave but there was no PA system," he said.

"What I realized was that people were using their mobile phones and laptops on Twitter to say that there was a much more interesting lecture going on across the hall."

Then he saw around 800 people show up at an event at a bar summoned by tweets from their friends.

"I realized that there was no such technology in existence, previously or now, except for Twitter, that would allow people to behave instantly as one," he said.

He said he and his partner realized then they'd created something new and went back to San Francisco the next day to create Twitter Inc.

"And that was the beginning of what would be just a crazy ride."

The former Google employee noted that since then, Twitter has been used not only to record people's musings but to spur social change, such as when it was embraced by pro-democracy advocates in the Middle East's so-called Arab Spring.

But Stone said if Twitter is a success, it's because of its users, not just technology.

"Humanity moves forward with a little help from technology but it's really people that are bringing about the change," he said.

"The Berlin Wall didn't come down because of telephones but telephones were involved in the process."

Twitter technology is merely about helping people to connect in real time and can help change the pace of events but it's people who do the real work, he said.