Twitter’s rapid growth shows no signs of slowing. As of today it looks like the messaging service has eclipsed 300 million accounts and is growing at a rate of close to three-quarters of a million accounts daily.
TwopCharts has the numbers. As of this writing – 7:05 a.m. PST – there were 300,869, 462 Twitter accounts with the service signing up 8.5 accounts per second. Extrapolating those numbers, we find that approximately 30,240 accounts are registered by the hour that comes to 725,760. Yet, less than a month ago it looked like Twitter had just passed 200 million accounts. Even at the amazing growth rates Twitter has had, 100 million users in a month is highly unrealistic.
To independently confirm TwopCharts’ numbers, we went ahead and registered a new Twitter account. In the profile view of users on the Twitter for iPad client it shows what number that account signed up as. Hence, a new account will give the newest number of total Twitter accounts. It is like when a baby is born … for a brief second, it is the youngest person in the world. So, @DanRWW is the 300,863,049th Twitter account. (Note, please do not follow that account as it was created solely for research purposes and will not be updated.)
It is much harder for Twitter to gauge exactly how many unique users it has than a service like Facebook, where people are independently confirmed, sometimes scrupulously so.
Twitter’s business page does not agree with these numbers. It has Twitter signing up 460,000 accounts daily with 200 million-plus users. On April 29, 2011 we reported that Twitter had just eclipsed the 200 million mark and here we are less than a month later saying it has reached 300 million. Even if we take the TwopCharts growth rate numbers, that would be, at most, 15 million users in that span.
We have reached out to Twitter for official numbers and will update when they respond.
UPDATE — May 18 — 11:20 a.m. PST — Twitter has responded but all they would say is that they have “more than 200 million accounts.” Nothing more specific than that.
