Twitter Hits 200M Active Users A Month: A Quick Look Back
Back in September of 2011 the CEO of Twitter revealed that they were ready to reveal a staggering statistic: 100 million active users a month – now here in 2012 that number has doubled. Between here and there you'll find that it was back on March 21st, 2012 (just three months into this year that's now ending, for those of you that like to twist it up), that Twitter announced they had hit a 140 million active users mark. Whether that number directly correlates with the 200 million "active users a month" (including @SlashGear) statistic is not entirely clear – what is entirely clear is that Twitter is growing, and growing fast.
Back when the 100 million active users mark was made, as AdAge noted Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo as saying that most of the active users "lurk" rather than tweet – active, it would seem, didn't necessarily mean users were pushing their own content. The image you're seeing above is a sketch drawn by none other than Jack Dorsey (originator of Twitter) that you can still find sitting in its original digital post spot on Flickr with the following note:
"On May 31st, 2000, I signed up with a new service called LiveJournal. I was user 4,136 which entitled me a permanent account and street cred in some alternate geeky universe which I have not yet visited. I was living in the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland California and starting a company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the web.
One night in July of that year I had an idea to make a more "live" LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. For the next 5 years, I thought about this concept and tried to silently introduce it into my various projects. It slipped into my dispatch work. It slipped into my networks of medical devices. It slipped into an idea for a frictionless service market. It was everywhere I looked: a wonderful abstraction which was easy to implement and understand.
The 6th year; the idea has finally solidified (thanks to the massively creative environment my employer Odeo provides) and taken a novel form. We're calling it twttr (though this original rendering calls it stat.us; I love the word.ed domains, e.g. gu.st/). It's evolved a lot in the past few months. From an excited discussion and persuasion on the South Park playground to a recently approved application for a SMS shortcode. I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.
Some things are worth the wait." – Jack Dorsey
Now here we sit with Twitter acting as one the main and most important social networks on the internet, a service that gets so much attention that news publications (like SlashGear) can't help but report news about it daily. It's no small thing to launch a winning tech business, and it's certainly worth your time of day to sketch out a new idea that might one day have 200 million active users working with it each month.
Have a peek at the the Twitter timeline below to see what this monster of a tiny social networking site has been up to over the past few weeks and be sure to hit up our Twitter tag for the full archive. I think you'll find that it's not just all about square photos and business battles – though that is a lot of it!
[via Twitter]