Twitter Tops 200 Million Users as Company Celebrates 7th Birthday

8:32 AM PDT 3/21/2013 by Georg Szalai

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Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

The micro-blogging service says its users send more than 400 million tweets per day, up from 340 million a year ago.

Twitter now has "well over 200 million" active users who send more than 400 million tweets per day, the micro-blogging service said Thursday in celebrating its seventh birthday.

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At its sixth anniversary last year, the company had touted more than 140 million active users and 340 million tweets a day.

The user update came a day after Google-owned online video site YouTube said that more than 1 billion people now visit it every month.

"There’s an old English saying, 'Keep a thing seven years, and you'll always find a use for it'," Karen Wickre, the company's editorial director, wrote in a blog post entitled Twitter Blog "Celebrating #Twitter7" on Thursday. "Today is Twitter’s 7th birthday ... We’ve seen breathtaking velocity in Twitter’s growth, which is due entirely to your many uses of it."

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet on March 21, 2006. Celebrities -- from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to Snooki -- have taken to the service as have media moguls, such as News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

This month, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a big media investor who holds stakes in the likes of Twitter and News Corp., also joined the micro-blogging service.

As a business, meanwhile, the privately held company has been focusing on developing revenue streams to make money from its service. Twitter was recently valued at about $9 billion.

"As we’ve grown, Twitter has become a true global town square -- a public place to hear the latest news, exchange ideas and connect with people all in real time," the company said in its blog post. "This is where you come to connect with the world at large. Get on your soapbox to critique elected officials, or go sotto voce to the neighbor next to you."

Twitter also made the video below to celebrate "some of the many moments on Twitter so far."

Said Wickre: "Here’s to your creativity, curiosity and experimentation on our platform. And again, thank you for making Twitter everything it is today."

E-mail: Georg.Szalai@thr.com
Twitter: @georgszalai