It's Official: Twitter Is Not a Fad

Whether because of its name, its outsize media hype, or its reputation for getting its users in trouble for ill-advised words, Twitter has struggled to be taken seriously by adult Americans outside the media and celebrity spheres. But while faddish firms like Groupon and Zynga have fallen by the wayside, new figures make it clear that the six-year-old microblogging site has lived up to its billing as the biggest thing to hit the Internet since Facebook.

Twitter announced (via tweet, of course) that it has reached 200 million monthly active users worldwide. That makes it either the second or third largest social network in the world, depending on what figures you use for Qzone, a Chinese Facebook substitute. More impressive is the speed at which it has reached that milestone. It was only last fall that Twitter was crowing about reaching the 100-million user mark, meaning that it has doubled in size in the past 15 months. When the company last shared its user tally, in March, it had 140 million monthly actives, so it has been adding active users at a rate of about 7 million a month. That's not quite as fast as Facebook's record-shattering growth at the same point in its development, but it's on the same order of magnitude.