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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

   user = unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week

and they want a billion users like that? Will never happen

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal

Why stop at a billion, then? Why not a trillion?

I think the point is that a billion users who log in once a week is not unrealistic, it's virtually impossible.

Over 2 Billion cellphones in the world - according to WolframAlpha (http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cellphones+worldwide)

never say never.

not in a 5 year time frame at least

Heh. Bill Gates said something similar about 640k of RAM once. There's certainly enough users to fill up that capacity. Why wouldn't it be possible?

What Bill Gates said was "I have a processor with a 20-bit physical address space and I have to divide it into a portion for software and a portion for hardware devices like video ROM. 640k seems like a reasonable place to make that division."

Really? Crap. My high school yearbook quote was "The computer will never need more than 640kb. -Bill Gates". Oops. All that being made fun of for nothing.

The most common quote I see is: "640k should be enough for anybody. - Bill Gates" and it bugs me every time. Thanks to the grandparent for setting the record straight.

Citation needed. Google picked you up nearly instantaneously though.

There's barely 1 billion people online worldwide. Granted, there are more than that who have mobile phones and could use Twitter via SMS, and the number of people online by 2014 will probably be much higher (2 billion?), but they don't want 1 billion user accounts in their database, they want 1 billion active users who interact with Twitter at least once a week. Supposedly something like 80% of people who sign up for Twitter never return, so they'll need 5 billion signups to get 1 billion active users.

Does Google even have 1 billion users who interact with them at least once a week?

Twitter is useless for anyone who isn't a marketer/promoter. Regular people would rather use facebook.

Facebook can reach 1 billion users, twitter cannot.

so most of twitter's 20m users are marketers & promoters? I don't consider myself a marketer and yet I'm on twitter. I'm on there because my friends are on there.

If you have a job, career or business, you ARE in marketing. Products and "services" include your own self and skills.

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