Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010. This is news from that month: 175 million registered users, 145 million in September, and a forecast of 200 million before 2011. Twitter has since been renamed X, and Tuenti shut down its social network in 2016.
The New York Times has published an interview, picked up by TechCrunch, in which Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, reveals some statistics about the network’s impressive growth.
Twitter now has 175 million registered users, 30 million more than in September, when it had 145 million.
If the trend continues, Evan expects to reach 200 million registered users before 2011. This rapid growth is reportedly due to remarks by US President Barack Obama, who mentioned the network and announced that he would publish some news of national interest on Twitter. That has been the best advertising the network could have had.
In 2007, Twitter had 503,000 registered users. From there it made the big leap to 58 million users in 2009, so today, with all the publicity we give it on blogs and websites, and with the media and press constantly talking about social networks, it will no doubt reach 200 million users by the end of this year.
Twitter keeps improving its network, where you can now see users’ videos and photos (only on some profiles), and, as we mentioned earlier, it plans to increase its workforce by 30%.
That’s why, if Tuenti (a Spanish social network) doesn’t hurry up and expand into new markets, it may see its users’ loyalty shift to other social networks, and over time it could lose its market leadership even in Spain, where, statistically, Tuenti ranks third among new users joining social networks, behind Facebook and Twitter, in that order.
Further reading
Featured image: Mai Le, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
