Twitter has its sight set on beating its two of the major competitors, Facebook and Google’s social networking site, Google+ by continuing to be to be simple, shared the chief executive of the company, today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Calif.
Twitter’s user base has grown manifolds and today it is believed that nearly 250 million tweets are sent across every day. One of the fundamental reasons behind the immense popularity of the site is that it’s simple and user friendly and owing to same, the company has consciously stayed away from adding new features, Costolo said.
“We think we can reach every person on the planet, we think the way to do that is to simplify it,” he said. “Over time, Google+ and Facebook will be more and more different than the experience we want to pass onto our users.”
Ever since its inception, there hasn’t been much change in Twitter. Each Tweet is around 140 characters long, and you can send out a Tweet through a mobile application or through a text message. It works on almost any device (thanks to text messaging), so it has outlasted other forms of communication that have been cut off during times of social unrest — such as the revolutions and uprisings that happened during the Arab Spring.
Currently twitter has a vast user base of around 100 million active users. And as compared to a mere 30 million users in the beginning, half of the current active users log in daily and send across their Tweets. Twitter reached its first benchmark of first billion Tweets, the 140 character bite sized messages, and now it takes hardly 4 to 5 for users to generate around a billion tweets.
Each user has a complicated social graph, which means each Tweet carries at least 100 data points that Twitter has to record, Costolo said.
“Not only has the global actives number grown tremendously this year, but the logins per day has grown tremendously,” Costolo said. “It was an extraordinary engineering challenge.”
With every passing quarter, Twitter has observed a steady growth of 40% in the users who uses their mobile to access Twitter, Costolo said. And owing to the new integration of Twitter with the iPhone operating system, three times the number of iOS users have started signing up for Twitter.
“We looked at the chart after the first day, we all anticipated that it would be big but we think it’ll be better than we thought it was,” Costolo said. “We have lofty ambitions; we want to be part of the fabric of every communication in the world.”
