Twitter appears to be on an unstoppable ascent in terms of active users. According to the San Francisco based company, it now has 100 million users monthly who are active on the site globally, while 50 million users access it on a daily basis. A report in the San Francisco Gate cites Twitter’s chief executive officer, Dick Costolo, as elaborating that “the number of active users increased 82% since the beginning of this year, putting the company on pace to add as many active users by the end of 2011 as the combined 26 million that Twitter added from 2006 to 2009.”

Further data from the company revealed that on average, there are 230 million tweets per day, a 110% increase since the beginning of this year, and more than five billion tweets per month. Additionally, Twitter has enjoyed a 70% increase since January in the number of visitors per month, bringing the site’s unique visitor count up to a sizeable 400 million. Equally as telling, more than half (55%) of its users do so from a mobile platform, such as a tablet or smartphone, even as the company asserted that internet-based users are on the rise as well.

Amidst queries about differentiating between active accounts versus registered accounts, with many users having multiple accounts, the San Francisco Gate reported that the company was focusing its attention on active users, rather than the overall base.  Mashable.com echoed this, explaining that half of the microblogging service’s 200 million users log in on a monthly basis, while less than 40% of users have not tweeted in the last month. Mashable also reported that Twitter expects to add 26 million active users between now and the end of the year.

The one interesting aspect of Twitter’s rise though, will not be how many more users it continues to attract, but how many users it can retain over time. Whether people outgrow their social network of choice, or make it a long term part of their lives over the long run (such as ten, twenty years), may just be the real litmus test for Twitter and other social networks such as Google+ that have enjoyed an enthusiastic growth in users.

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