Twitter claims 105 million registered users

Twitter has more than 105 million registered users, co-founder Biz Stone said Wednesday.

The announcement, at the micro-blogging site's Chirp conference for developers, marked the first time Twitter has announced it number of accounts. The tally - 105,779,710, to be exact - is significantly more than outside analysts had estimated.

The company also says it's adding 300,000 accounts per day, with much of its growth coming outside the United States.

The number, of course, doesn't address how many of those accounts are active. It comes after months of outside speculation that the number of monthly visitor to Twitter's main page had peaked – after astronomical growth in early 2009.

Web analytics company Compete estimates that Twitter's number of unique monthly visitors has stayed roughly the same since June 2009.

But on Wednesday, Stone said most of Twitter's daily traffic comes from third-party applications, which often don't require a stop by the site's main page (which nevertheless got a makeover last week).

As Mashable's Adam Ostrow notes in a blog post from the conference, the number still pales in comparison to social-networking giant Facebook's more than 400 million registered accounts.

But it's closer than most observers would have guessed, which bodes well for Twitter a day after it rolled out an advertising plan that it hopes will turn the much-talked-about site into an actual moneymaker.

Posted in: Social sites