Private companies usually don"t release much in the way of specific information on their own. Today, according to AllThingsD.com, that changed for the Twitter social networking service. Speaking at a press conference today, Twitter"s CEO Dick Costolo said that the service currently has 100 million active users. However, the Twitter.com web site has 400 million monthly visitors. That means that a lot of people who check out Twitter are either not active users or haven"t got a Twitter account at all. Even among the active users, Costolo said that 40 percent of them don"t actually "tweet" their own messages; they simply read the tweet written by the other 60 percent of active users. In addition, 55 percent of active Twitter users access the service via mobile products.
These current numbers for Twitter are already much higher compared to the beginning of 2011. Costolo said that back in January, there were just 250 million visitors to the Twitter.com site. He also said that the company has been busy improving its own infrastructure in order to keep up with demand. On Sunday, August 28, Twitter recorded a record setting 8,900 "tweets" per second generated by its users, thanks in part to a number of events like Hurricane Irene, the announcement of pop singer Beyonce’s pregnancy and more.
While other social networking services such as Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Google+ seem to be getting more complex as they add new features, Twitter wants to go in a different direction. Costolo said, "We’re thinking of Twitter as how can we simplify the product even further, what can we edit out."