Twitter seems to be on a roll to reach a big milestone in the coming year. As of today Twitter has said that they have added more than 100 million users this year alone. Some notable joiners to Twitter this year include @billgates, @tigerwoods and @cher.

So how much is Twitter’s total user base? Roughly around 224 million users. To figure this out I used Twitter’s API to request user information and I was able to get information for users up-to 224,789,500. You can do view the information by visiting this link http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=224789500.

So is Twitter quickly catching up with Facebook? Not exactly, Facebook has over 500 million users and Twitter is yet to get halfway there, but the growth it has shown in the past year or so has been tremendous. If Twitter continues to grow at this pace it wouldn’t catch up with Facebook, however, they should definitely be able to reach somewhere near the 400 million users by next year.

Please note that there might be a discrepancy on whether this ID is an actual incremental number in the database or not, however, I was able to create two users to confirm that they were indeed getting incremental.

Test User 1 was assigned the ID 224788434 – http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=224788434

Test User 2 was assigned the ID 224789253 – http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=224789253

As you can see this shows that Twitter is actually incrementing this number. You can also browse all the IDS by numbers too, so these indicated that the profile numbers are actually the Twitter user counts.

P.S. Ev’s Twitter Account ID is 20 http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=20 and Biz’s is 13 http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.xml?user_id=13.