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The numbers are slightly misleading. 40% of those projects are gists (pastebin like service). While those gists COULD turn into full projects, it's doubtful. Thus the number is more like 600,000 hosted projects.

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To be fair, we've only advertised "repositories" on our front page — not "projects" — and gists are all full-fledged git repositories. TechCrunch added the "projects".

"Project" is a pretty ambiguous term, of course; there's gists that are multi-file full-fledged database adapters, there's gists with one-line bug fixes. Both could be more influential than full-fledged "normal" projects... it depends on the circumstances. I think each have their place in programmer society.

I chose to use "projects" over "repositories" in the headline to make it more understandable to a non-coder. There are some gists are more worthy of being called a full project than many repositories anyway. Hopefully this doesn't take away from the main point which is that github is kicking ass.

A metric like 'active repositories' is probably more meaningful and doesn't involve the woolly distinction between 'projects' and 'gists'. Say, repositories with a checkin (other than repo creation) in the last N days.

With the ease of forking even plain 'repository' is a relatively vague term.

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