Twitter, the microblogging social network which processes more than a billion tweets a week, is set to hit the milestone figure later today, claims Twopcharts, a third party Twitter analysis company.
However, the 500 million relates to the total number of registered accounts, and fails to reveal how many are active.
Presently there are 100 million active Twitter accounts; a figure which was announced by the company’s executives last September.
Twopcharts estimates the number of registered tweeters using assumptions that rely on the correlation between registration dates, publicly available Twitter account IDs (which have a number attached to them) and user figures announced by the executive team. It admits that its figures could be inaccurate as they are based on limited information and some interpretations.
Right now, roughly 8% of all internet users tweet on a daily basis, scoring a 3% increase over August 2011 timeframe.