Twitter surpasses 200M active monthly users

Twitter has not yet hit the saturation point.

The booming social network and venue for the "pulse of the planet" said today that it now has more than 200 million active monthly users. It delivered the news in, it goes almost without saying, a tweet:

There are now more than 200M monthly active @twitter users. You are the pulse of the planet. We're grateful for your ongoing support!

— Twitter (@twitter) December 18, 2012

Twitter had hit the 100 million mark in September 2011, and as of spring 2012 was boasting of 140 million. It was at that latter point in time that Twitter disclosed its not so modest ambition of eventually reaching 2 billion users. Facebook, by contrast, currently claims on the order of 1 billion monthly active users.

All those Twitter users now generate 1 billion tweets every two-and-a-half days, according to Twitter.

They're also doing a lot of retweeting, a key indicator of Twitter's sweep, and the records keep on falling. Just two months after Justin Bieber had claimed the title of most-retweeted (223,000-plus) tweet for his thoughts on the cancer-related death of a young fan, President Obama blew past that figure in a landslide (350,000-plus) with the sharing of his re-election tweet, "Four more years."

But you don't get to 200 million through celebrities and politicians alone. So how enmeshed has Twitter become in the lives of ordinary folk? It's even managed to light a fire under the seemingly antique methods of rating viewership of TV shows. Yesterday, Twitter and TV ratings agency Nielsen to create a new tweet-based measure that will go into effect at the start of the fall 2013 season.

"Twitter has become the world's digital water cooler," Chloe Sladden, Twitter's vice president of media, said in announcing the Nielsen news.