The two biggest social networking services, at least in the Western world, are Facebook and Twitter. While Facebook may claim that it has over 750 million registered users, Twitter is still growing in both registered users and in messages generated by its users. News.com reports that during a tech conference on Monday evening, Twitter"s CEO Dick Costolo said that the site now generates a massive 250 million messages per day. That compares to "just" 100 million messages per day which Twitter recorded at the beginning of 2011.
Costolo also said that Twitter now has over 100 million active users globally and that half of those people log in to use Twitter every day. Mobile use of Twitter is also growing at a rate of 40 percent a quarter. Last week, Apple"s release of the iOS 5 operating system also included better integration with Twitter. As a result, Costolo said that daily sign ups went up three times just on the first day of iOS 5"s release.
Twitter is still a privately owned company but Costolo claims that it doesn"t feel the need to launch a public stock offering anytime soon, mainly because it has raised $800 million from investors. He also said that Twitter is putting in more ads in its messages, but that users shouldn"t feel like they are being flooded with paid ads, saying, "Twitter will introduce ads that resonate with what Twitter users are used to."