Some New Twitter Numbers..

Twitter looks awfully mainstream--there's no other way to read the data Twitter chief executive Evan Williams shared in a blog post last night.

I don't say that on account of the more than 145 million users Williams claimed for the San Francisco-based status-update-sharing service, though that counts as a pretty good audience in anybody's Internet math. No, instead look at the chart showing how people access Twitter.

The most popular channel is Twitter's regular site, through which 78 percent of its users accessed the service over the last 30 days. No surprise there. But note the second- and third-most popular channels. Twitter's mobile site (m.twitter.com) which works in even the plainest phone browsers, had a 14 percent share, and its even-more-compatible text-messaging option came in at 8 percent. (The numbers don't add up to 100 because you can use more than one app to read or write Twitter updates.)

Only after that do you see the smartphone applications you might have expected to see rank higher; the iPhone and BlackBerry apps, for example, came in fourth and fifth at 8 and 7 percent. Weirdly, the Android app--which I use so much that I've started forgetting what the mobile site looks like--doesn't even make the top 10 in Williams' list.

(Got an iPad? Twitter just released an iPad application that's been drawing some raves among the people I follow.)

Any time a Web service gets popular enough to draw serious traffic outside the universe of people who carry around high-end gadgets, it's a big deal. So is that service's settling on a business model or being deemed worthy of archival by the Library of Congress.

In the interests of full disclosure--and blatant self-promotion--I've beenusing Twitter since early 2008 as a sort of public notebook. Sometime in the last week, I crossed the 4,000-follower mark... which only seems impressive until you look at the far larger Twitter audiences of colleagues like Ezra Klein or Chris Cillizza.

There are more ways than Twitter to connect with me online, though: MyWeb chat runs from noon to 1 today. So if you're curious about Apple's new products--or anything else that's been going in the tech business lately--stop by and ask away.

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