14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was on stage for an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit where he shared some new stats about the company and reiterated Twitter's focus on simplicity and its strategy going forward.
He confirmed Twitter's $8 billion, EUR5.72 billion valuation, that had been rumored when the company raised some funding recently.
The figure is moot though, Twitter has no plans for an IPO so its current valuation is little more than a curiosity.
The site has been growing nicely, though Twitter, like everyone else, likes to remind people just how much better it's doing with each public occasion.
The amount of tweets hitting the site each day has grown dramatically in the last year. It was at 90 million tweets per day in September 2010 and rose to 100 million per day by the end of that year.
At this point, Twitter sees about 250 million tweets on a regular day, a 177 percent growth, and goes through one billion tweets every four to five days.
That's encouraging, but Twitter has another metric that should be even more welcomed, half of its 100 million active users visit the site every day. That's up from just 30 percent of them at the beginning of the year.
Costolo also had some early numbers related to the iOS 5 integration, he said sign ups have increased three-fold in the days after iOS became available.
Of course, Twitter has never had a problem getting people to sign up, it's keeping them there that's the issue. And it's an issue that Twitter hasn't cracked, but the growing number of daily active users should be a sign that it's moving in the right direction.
It's going to have to do better than that if it wants to live up to its own lofty ambitions. Twitter is now aiming to be available on two billion devices and to be used by every person on the planet.