Katie Stanton, the VP of the 140 character social networking service has announced that the number of Twitter registered accounts has now exceeded 200 million. 
There has been talk of this number since around the start of this year, Tom Johansmeyer’s article in Social Times mentions an email sent out by Twitter with this huge fact hidden near the bottom. Of course Twitter did not reveal how many of these accounts were actually active, this number may be somewhat lower.
Twitter has just turned 5 years old, and for an idea supposedly born from a chat on a park bench about an internal group SMS, it’s really taken off/flying high/spread it’s wings/and other bird related clichés too. There are many conflicting statistics on the web regarding Twitter’s popularity and success, take a look at the infographic supplied by the guys at visual.ly which provides facts and figures in a time line from inception to present day.
What will the future hold for Twitter and it’s users? Over 60% of the information shared on Twitter comes via third party applications. Twitter is rumoured to be taking steps to monitor and police this software, and there are fears that in the future Twitter may only allow their own ‘official’ software to access it’s service. There have also apparently been talks with Google and Facebook, both showing an interest in aquiring Twitter and it’s massive customer base to the tune of $8-10 billion.
Apart from it’s basic use as a social micro blogging site Twitter has seen astounding numbers in the event of natural disasters and widespread emergencies. Apart from relaying news Twitter was used by those affected to ask for and offer help, in October 2007 to track wildfires in California. In November 2008 users living in Mumbai communicated information about terrorist attacks, and in June 2009 reporters and protesters communicated information about the Iran elections. On the day of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami there were 177 million tweets shared, from an average of 140 million.
Twitter has raised the profile of a number of celebrities and politicians, at present the top five most followed on Twitter are:
1. Lady GaGa – 11,689,056 followers
2. Justin Bieber – 11,091,926 followers
3. Barack Obama – 9,151,165 followers
4. Britney Spears – 8,526,399 followers
5. Katy Perry – 8,365,550 followers
What the future holds for Twitter isn’t certain, but what is for sure is it’s consistently increasing popularity and potential value to other search and social networks.
Katie Stanton became head of International Strategy at Twitter in July 2010. She had previously worked with the US Department of State, is a veteran of Google, and has worked for Yahoo! Finance.