Twitter said on Thursday that the number of active monthly users has soared to more than 100 million with the majority of people logging in on the go.
“We’re seeing tremendous growth on mobile,” Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo said during an informal “State of the Union” update with reporters at the microblogging service’s headquarters in San Francisco.
The number of “global active users” — people who log in at least once a month — has jumped 82 percent from the start of the year, with mobile climbing 40 percent each quarter for the past year, according to Costolo.
More than 400 million people visit the twitter.com Web site monthly as compared with 250 million at the start of the year, according to figures he provided from a Google analytics service.
“There are still a lot of people who don’t log into Twitter, but use Twitter every day,” Costolo said. “They come and search or read pages.”
‘RETWEETS’
An average of 230 million terse text messages, many of them “retweets,” are fired off daily at Twitter in a 110 percent increase since the start of the year. About 40 percent of the people considered active users of Twitter do not send messages, referred to as “tweets.”
Costolo dismissed the threat of competition from the freshly launched Google+ social network.
Google+ will pull in massive numbers of users by bundling together the Internet giant’s other popular offerings including search, YouTube, Gmail, and the Android software mobile platform, Costolo predicted.
EDIT DOWN
“I think these other platforms will add services and capabilities and we will try to edit ours down,” Costolo said. “We are thinking differently in how we can simplify the product further; what we can take out.”
The health of Twitter’s business is strong and a recent infusion of US$400 million has left the startup feeling no pressure to go public with a stock offering, according to Costolo.
“We have what can only be referred to as a truckload of money in the bank,” he said. “We want to be able to remain independent and not beholden to public markets.”
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