At the ongoing Web 2.0 Summit at San Francisco, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed some gigantic figures for the micro-blogging site at a speaker dinner on Monday. He said that Twitter now gets 250 million tweets per day, a 177% rise from 90 million tweets per day in September 2010 and 100 million tweets at the beginning of 2011. The CEO said that a billion tweets make their presence felt in a matter of every 4-5 days.
Amongst those 250 million tweets, Costolo, is sure that there would be enough content so as to be relevant to a new user. “We have got to figure out how to capture the volume at the same time as separating the signal from the noise,” he said.
Likewise, the number of active users everyday has also gone up from 30% to 50% . Costolo also said that signups had increased 3 times with the Twitter iOS 5 integration. However, the Twitter team is in no mood to slow down. Responding to a question, Costolo answered, “We think that we can be on 2 billion devices around the world, and reach every person on the planet, and the way to do that is through simplifying.”
Considering Twitter’s awe-inducing statistics and plans, it is no wonder that venture capitalists value the site at $ 8 billion dollars. Though, some may find the valuation an exaggeration, the fact is that Twitter is gaining ground with its promoted tweets. Costolo reportedly said that the promoted tweets are working better than anticipated. “Twitter would roll more kinds of ads because it is important for Twitter to help businesses amplify the communications they are already having on the site,” said Costolo.
He was however, careful not ruffle users’ feathers. “Twitter will introduce ads that resonate with what Twitter users are used to,” he said.
Scoffing the idea that Twitter would go public anytime soon, Costolo said that the site had raised $ 800 million, far than it needed, and so the need to go public just does not exist.
The final question of the Dick Costolo speaker dinner of the summit was asked by Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media. He wanted to know when Twitter users would be able to access their Twitter histories. “I have got 49,119 tweets and ¼ as many DMs, if Google has a Data Liberation Front, and 30% of your team is former Googlers, shouldn’t you guys be working on something similar?” he asked. Costolo replied in jest when he said that he was whining about the very fact at the summit. On a serious note he said, “We want to be able to access old Tweets and old DMs, we just have to prioritize the work. It is a matter of priorities, we need to get to the point when we will be able to do this.”
With 700 employees and $ 1.6 billion in funding, Twitter should not really find it a challenge to meet such a popular user request.