Twitter is heading toward 200 million users by the end of 2010, leading to changes in the company's executive structure.
Twitter could nearly pass 200 million users by the end of 2010 if it
continues adding new ones at a rate of 370,000 a day.
That calculation comes courtesy of
an
Oct. 30 article in The New York Times, which pegged the microblogging
Website's current user base at 175 million. With 60 days left in 2010, that
puts Twitter on track to reach 197.5 million users by the end of the year-or
even pass the 200 million mark, given the natural fluctuations in people
joining and leaving.
The article quotes Evan Williams, who recently resigned as Twitter's CEO,
about the meteoric rise in users and attendant media scrutiny: "We were
just hanging on by our fingernails to a rocket ship."
Williams recently moved himself
from
CEO to the head of product strategy. "I am most satisfied when pushing
product direction,"
he wrote in an Oct. 4
posting on Twitter's corporate blog. "Building things is my passion,
and I've never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build."
Williams touted his replacement, Twitter COO Dick Costolo, as effective at "devising
and executing our revenue efforts" while "making the trains run on
time"-both skills necessary for a growing company.
During the CTIA Wireless 2010 conference in March, Twitter co-founder Biz
Stone discussed what he perceived as microblogging's impact on the world at
large. "Allowing people to communicate can have a positive impact: You
have more of a sense of yourself as a global citizen,"
he
told the audience during a keynote discussion. "We're the facilitators
of this open exchange of information; we just need to keep the service running."
Twitter has also managed to capitalize on the rising popularity of
smartphones, issuing apps for a variety of mobile platforms. On Oct. 28, it
launched Twitter for Windows Phone, allowing owners of the new Windows Phone 7
handsets to broadcast to the world their lunch preferences or celebrity
sightings. Twitter's aggressiveness in developing apps for BlackBerry, Google
Android and the Apple iPhone
has
attracted the irritation of third-party developers.
Twitter's rise in popularity, however, has come with the inevitable security
concerns.
In
late September, another worm hit the service, snaring some high-profile
users before the company disabled the malicious link.
Security
experts also recommend that users not tweet information such as vacation
times, which could give burglars a timeframe for a break-in, or excessively
personal details.
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