Reason to chirp

By K.N.C. | LONDON

TWITTER is soaring like its blue avian mascot. The company boasts 140m active users who send at least one tweet a month, and together they produce more than 400m tweets per day. It took more than three years for the company to handle its first billion tweets, but today it carries that many every two and a half days, said Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, during an interview with Tom Standage, digital editor of The Economist, at our Ideas Economy: Information 2012 conference on June 6th in San Francisco (full video above).

Though Twitter makes its "firehose" of tweets available for licensing through two independent firms, the company sees the greatest commercial prospects in advertising. The company is "born of mobile", said Mr Costolo, who noted that Twitter has already seen its mobile advertising overtake non-mobile advertising on some days.

The firm has established a clever policy to discourage firms from bombarding people with meaningless ads, by only allowing messages that have also been sent to a firms' followers. "It's fairly spam resilient, because you don't end up with companies wanting to send spammy messages out that lose free followers just so they can pay to show this message," Mr Costolo said. He insisted that Twitter is not focused on a stockmarket listing. We believe that wholeheartedly. #not