Only 175M of 500M? The people are Techcrunch are so out of touch with reality. That's more than 20% of users. If 20% of all your users are active, you should be commended.

In a lawsuit filed against spam tool providers in april; twitter claimed it had 140 million active users. 140 million claim is right on page 1. http://www.scribd.com/doc/88206156/Twitter-lawsuit-to-counte...

Which also begs the question, how many of those active users are actual people?

So what qualifies an active user ? I have a twitter account and even though I have never tweeted (yet) I do follow a bunch of people and regularly read up on what they have to say. I am sure there are several more like me.

its a funny world where 170M is seen in a negative light.

Twitter seems great for celebrities. Not being a celebrity, however, my experience with twitter has been one of extreme isolation. I'd bet most of my followers are either bots or marketers. The rest are mostly strangers with whom I share no common interests.

The result feels like standing on an empty street corner and shouting to one in particular. There's no interaction and no indication that anyone is reading anything I post, ever.* At least on HN or reddit, I get near instant feedback on just about everything I post.

* I did get a response from Darude one time, which was pretty cool.

That is a very weird use of the word "only".

When I finally broke down and signed up with Twitter over a year and a half ago, my first half dozen handle choices - all based on my fairly unusual given name were taken by what appeared to be placeholders. (No profile, few is any tweets/followers/following and nothing recent).

I'm surprised that 34% are active. I'd have guessed at something more like 5-10%.

I have 6 accounts, and use just 1, and that too once every 2-3 months.

I'm guessing the active accounts follow a Zipfian distribution; and probably the most active ones are bots and corporate accounts (managed by teams of people).

There's a lot of people logged out or that doesn't change most of her data... so I think that this data isn't accurate.

But they don't make money, so each new user contributes negative amount to the bottom line.

Grow it by volume? lol