As most of you know, Twitter has been one of the most rapidly growing web technologies of the past few years. It has been gaining so much publicity in such a short period of time that it's nothing short of a buzzword among social networking, the web industry, online marketing, traditional media, cell phone makers and more.

Even among the market analysts, however, things have been a little cloudy as to what exactly their business model is, how this trend is affecting the web as a whole and what Twitter's longer-term affects will be.

Ev Williams (Twitter co-founder) shared some important numbers with the online community at the recent Chirp conference. The brief version is as follows:

This doesn't explain much about their goals, monetization plans or future integration with other web services, but it does help us understand the magnitude of Twitter as a global influence.

Anyone in the industry who though this was a fad that will quickly blow over, is probably thinking twice. Twitter will be around for a while, and those who have already started using it to their benefit are in an advantageous position.