Over 100mn people joined Twitter in 2010

LONDON - It seems microblogging site Twitter is here to stay.

According to a statement released by the company, more than 100 million people have joined Twitter this year, bringing the total to 200 million twitterers worldwide.

And some of the famous joiners this year include Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Kanye West and Cher, reports the Telegraph.

The site is widely recognised as a vital source of breaking news and views, providing real-time, eyewitness accounts of events such as the Iran election protests, the crash-landing of an aircraft on the Hudson River, and the earthquake in Haiti.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has published more detailed statistics on Twitter in a separate report.

It claims that eight percent of American adult Internet users are on Twitter, although the figure rose to 14 percent for 18-29 year-olds.

Almost a quarter of Twitter users check the service several times a day, although 21 percent said they never checked it at all, suggesting that some people sign up to the service, but don’t use it.

The study also revealed that African-American and Latino adult Internet users in the United States were twice as likely as white American adults to use Twitter.

Pew’s study found that around 13 percent of Latino adult web users and 18 percent of African-American adult web users also use Twitter, compared to just eight percent of white adults.

It added that minority groups are bigger users of the microblogging service because they are younger and more connected to mobile technology.

“Both of those groups, African-American and Latino adult Internet users in the US, tend to be younger than white Internet users, which helps to lead to their adoption of Twitter,” said Aaron Smith, a senior research specialist with the Pew project.

“Both of those groups are also very mobile populations in their use of cell phones in particular to access the web. Overall, non-whites are more likely than white cell phone owners to do a range of non-voice tasks on their cell phones. They are more likely to use instant messaging and social networking on their phones,” he added. (ANI)