Social network sites phenomena

Twitter reaches 500 million registered users

Twitter has recently reached 500 million registered users. Although it is not much if compared to Facebook, its a big number if you think on quantity of people reaching to social network sites all over the world. It might show traces that social network sites are here to stay


By GABRIELA ZAGO (gabriela.zago@tosefans.com)
from Porto Alegre, BRAZIL

Tweet

According to Twopcharts, Twitter has reached 500 million registered users in February 2012. Registered users is not the same as active users. If we consider what Twitter has stated on its blog, there are around 100 million active users in the site - that is, users that actually use the site, at least once a month. The other 400 million are accounts that were created sometime in the six years of the microblog's existence and that were later deleted or abandoned.

Twitter's 100 million active users is almost nothing compared to Facebook's 845 million active users, but it is something if you compare to the average population of large countries. If compared to countries, Twitter has a huge database of users, approximately double the population of Brazil, or something like 60 Serbias.

If Twitter maintains its currently speed of growth (something like more than 10 new accounts per second), Twopcharts estimates that it will reach 600 million registered users in two months, an impressive tax of growth (100 million new accounts in two months).

Recently, Pinterest , a social networking platform that allows its users to share interesting pictures in virtual pinboards, broke a new web record by reaching 10 million U.S. monthly active users faster than any other website ever . Formsprin, a few years later, took only two months to reach 10 million global active users.

What these numbers tell us is that online social networking is a phenomena that is here to stay. Whether people are on Twitter or Facebook, or Pinterest or Formspring, they're using the web to share information among contacts. The question now is not if people will use this sites, but what will they use them for.