Twitter’s Dick Costello insights at Web 2.0 Summit

Tim O’Reilly and Twitter CEO Dick Costello have had a good chat at the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday.

I watch their Q&A and I wanted to summarise some new stats about Twitter you may find interesting.

New Twitter stats:

– 250 million Tweets posted every day, every 4 days around 1 billion Tweets.

– Each Tweet has a significant number of data points for Twitter to analyse, eg Username, location, language, Tweet keywords, device, time etc etc.

– 100 million global active users, half of these login every day.

– The iOS5 integration has increased new user sign-ups significantly.

– More ads are coming to Twitter. They may be Richer Content (ie Display ads), but won’t interrupt the current flow/ users. Dick Costello said they won’t throw something new onto the platform, it has to align with current functionality.

– Fail Whales are becoming less frequent. For a long time Twitter was hosted in a scaled environment but they could not scale any higher – as a result in peak times we would get fail whales.

Twitter is now in their own Datacentre and can simple add more machines as needed to keep up with demand. You would have noticed over the past 2 months there have been minimal fail whales.

Here is the video if you want to watch it: