200,000 "active users" equals the population of Shreveport, Louisiana.

are there any web analytics packages that do these sorts of comparisons?

my band played for a crowd of 3500 once -- that felt like a huge mass of people, but it's peanuts in web terms. it'd be fun to see random comparisons to meatspace in your site analytics. e.g., "this week, your site's active users could've sold out madison square garden 8 times" or "your monthly uniques exceed the population of maine."

Three million messages per day is the same volume as those sent by the population of Bulgaria - which has seven million people and 85% mobile telephone usage.

Twitter has $5 million in funding? That seems excessive.

So it's the end of the speculation, but not the end of the speculation because the data -> useless?

Why is it useless?

Approaching useless.

And here's some quotes from the article:

"None of that data is particularly useful, since so much of the action on Twitter occurs via mobile phones, instant messaging and desktop clients"

"Note: It’s not clear what the 1 million total users refers to, since there are many more registered users"

Also, note the commenters saying that the count is higher/lower than expected. Plus some not sure what to expect. I'm not hating on Twitter or the OP, just find the data rather meaningless.

I stand corrected.

Site traffic is definitely a weak metric, and total users indeed probably isn't that interesting.

I find the 200K active users/week and 3M messages quite interesting. I admit, it would be more enlightening to know the distribution -- or at least something like the median number of messages per active user -- but that's a pretty good sense of the reach of Twitter.

I hear what you're saying. Seeing some numbers does at least indicate people are using it. So if that was in doubt before, I guess it isn't now. But did anyone really doubt it?