Look how Twitter has evolved…

...from notepad sketch to more than 140 million active users...

If you're based in the UK, you've likely heard the announcement this week from Twitter about UK usage of Twitter from the traditional media. As a big fan of Twitter I wanted to look beyond the "10 million users" headline to see about how this compares to use in other countries.

Twitter has certainly come a long way since founder Jack Dorsey sketched out this wireframe in 2006!

Notice how the status updates are "in bed" and "going to park" - content sharing wasn't on the wire at this point!

Appropriately, the current coverage stems from a single tweet sent out from the official @TwitterUK sent this tweet out on Tuesday:

Snapshot of Twitter in the UK: 10m active users, 80% of which are also active on mobile. And an office that’s been open almost a year!

— Twitter UK (@TwitterUK) May 15, 2012

So, there's not so much more to report behind the headlines. The figure about the use of mobile is interesting, another sign how mobiles are becoming an everyday way to access the web.

With these types of usage figure, you have to ask "what is active?" Is it active every day, week, month, six weeks. Twitter have provided a clarification to this question

@Jack_Ashman it's users who log in at least once every 30 days

— Twitter UK (@TwitterUK) May 15, 2012

With Twitter, this isn't so active - a weekly or daily figure would be more telling. Still, Twitter has come a long way certainly and should be managed as part of a social media communications strategy by every established company.

There's no further info on other countries from the UK, but when it reproduced the notepad example above, the Twitter blog reported in March this year that there are 140 million active users worldwide and today we see 340 million Tweets a day. That’s more than 1 billion every 3 days.