In March 2007, Twitter became the darling of the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. An award-winning presence there launched the microblogging service into the Web 2.0 stratosphere, leading to capital investments and a community of developers and fans. By the time SXSW returns next month (March 7-16), Twitter almost certainly will have surpassed one million members.
Bruno Peeters of Twitter Facts projects 1 million twitterers by March
This is ahead of schedule. Back at the start of the new year, Bruno Peeters—author of the great blog Twitter Facts—predicted that Twitter would reach the one-million-member mark by April 1, 2008. Even at the time, there were two caveats to that estimate.
First, that magic number was based on the member count as tracked by TwitDir since early summer. Twitter hasn’t released any official membership numbers, although they did celebrate their one-millionth tweet a year ago, about 8 months after launch. Second, the TwitDir figure excludes a number of private tweet streams, which Peeters reports as 10-15% of all members. If that is true, the 910,000 confirmed twitterers as of last night (Feb. 21) may indicate Twitter has already reached the magic million-member mark.
The pace of new membership is still increasing. TwitDir cleared the 900,000 mark on Tuesday with increases of about 3000 and 7000 on successive days. In that very small sample size, that is a pace trajectory of an extra 1000 members each day, or 12,000 new members on Friday, 18,000 on Saturday, and so on. I doubt that will hold up, but if it does it would mean even by TwitDir’s conservative estimate, Twitter would reach one million on February 27.
Bruno concurs, having adjusted his earlier projection, stating strongly that Twitter would get its seventh digit by March 1. That means 100,000 new members in about a week.