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Twitter Growth Explodes

Impressive new data from Twitter sent Web watchers into a tizzy late Monday and early Tuesday. At an event on Monday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company has gone from 90 million tweets per day in September of 2010 to 250 million tweets per day -- a 177% increase.  

What’s driving the growth? In large part, its recent integration with iOS 5, the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, according to Costolo. “Just days after iOS 5′s debut last week, the microblogging startup has already gotten a major lift from the big partnership,” GigaOm writes.

“Twitter is deeply integrated with iOS 5 at a very basic level,” The Next Web writes of the partnership. “It is the first outside service that has gained this level of access to Apple’s iOS system, although Apple was rumored to be striking a deal with Facebook.”

What does the growth mean for Twitter? Well, “Costolo said that those 250 million tweets mean that there’s enough content on the site that a new user should be able to find something relevant to them,” TechCrunch reports.

As such, Costolo thinks that Twitter deserves a nice new valuation. How nice? $8 billion nice, Costolo said on Monday, according to Business Insider. "Let's just call it an even $8 billion," Costolo said.

Yet, as Costolo admitted on Monday, Twitter has to first make sense of all those tweets before it can translate them to user relevance. He explained, therefore, that the company is intensely focused on figuring out ways to deal with the volume and deepen engagement, CNet reports.

"We need to be able to surface that content so people coming for the first time and discover what's happening in their world and in the world," Costolo said. "To separate the signal from the noise."

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