Did you know that Twitter recently surpassed 500 million registered users?

Yep. Half a billion. Impressive, right? That’s half as big as Facebook. Except… it isn’t. Facebook’s 955 million tally is based on active users – I’ve speculated in the past as to how many total users Facebook has (that is, anyone who has signed up at any time), but it’s likely now well above two billion, which, by any count, is a lot more than Twitter, who revealed it had just 140 million active users back in March of this year.

That number should be quite a bit higher by now, but it hasn’t leapt up to 500 million, which was the figure proposed by Semiocast in their study. Which means that (approximately, and assuming growth over the past six months in actives) around two-thirds of Twitter’s total user tally is made up of inactive accounts.

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At The Guardian Activate summit in April of this year, Katie Stanton, Twitter’s vice president of international strategy, announced that the platform had 200 million registered accounts.

Back in May we reported on data from Twopcharts that calculated that Twitter had seen it’s 300 millionth registered profile – according to Twopcharts, that number is now up to over 360 million. And counting.

So what gives? Why can’t we get a straight answer on exactly how many users Twitter has?

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Twitter has just passed 300 million users and is now seeing a heady 9.2 new profiles being registered each and every second, says Twitter account tracker Twopcharts, who calculated the data based on registered user IDs.

The important word you’re looking for? Allegedly.

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Answer: Less than 21 million.

That’s the findings of a new report from Business Insider that looked at the total number of Twitter users that were following 30 or more people, which is the level that Twitter themselves uses to rank an account as active.

And if true, that’s a pretty shocking state of affairs for Twitter, especially when held up against Facebook (or even MySpace), and could have huge ramifications for the viability of the network as an advertising platform.

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Anytime now Twitter is going to announce that they’ve passed 200 million registered users – in fact, they could have done this as early as December 2010, given the platform reached 175m users at the end of October, which was up some 30 million from two months before.

Big deal, you say. Facebook has 610 million registered users (as of Feb 15, 2011). And you’d be right to notice the distinction. Facebook is, after all, three times the size of Twitter.

But here’s the thing: it took Facebook 5 years and 2 months to reach 200 million users.

Twitter did it 5 months quicker.

Who cares, you say. In the past year alone, Facebook has added 210 million users – more than Twitter has in total. And you’d be right to point this out.

But consider this for a moment: Twitter had just 75m users in January 2010. By the end of the year it had increased in size by 166%. Over that same period, Facebook grew by ‘just’ 60% (on an estimation of 375m users in January 2010 and 600m by the end of the year).

What I’m saying is: statistically, Twitter is growing faster. Sure, Facebook’s overall numbers are far more impressive, and on a daily basis it appears to be adding about 570,000 users to Twitter’s last-estimated 370,000 (although that number should be quite a bit higher by now), but: it appears Facebook’s growth is slowing. And by all accounts, Twitter’s is accelerating. It has the momentum, and the spirit, like an annoying, yappy little Doberman puppy nipping away at a Great Dane’s heels.

And when you think about it, you can understand why. Facebook gets a ton of online hype, but Twitter gets far more mainstream media coverage, to a point where it’s almost casual. As I’ve said before, you never see a TV news reporter, sports caster or live show turning to Facebook to check on the public’s reaction. That’s because they can’t, because despite their best intentions it’s still predominately a closed garden for many people. And that means the folks on TV and in the newspapers can’t get in and have a look around.

But they can on Twitter – it’s very easy to tap into mass reaction. So it gets heavily reported, and that starts to register with people, even non users. And before you know it, Twitter becomes the mainstream – on a truly global scale.

But let’s hold our collective horses. Facebook is still absolutely miles ahead. At current pace, Facebook should reach 1 billion users in less than two years. It will take Twitter more than five.

But that’s at current pace. What if things change? What if they change a lot? If Twitter doubles their userbase again in 2011, and with it their daily sign-up rate, and Facebook’s daily pace slows to around 400,000 or so, both will be on track to reach the magic billion by the end of 2013.

Okay, that’s a lot of coulda woulda shoulda. Plus we haven’t even talked about active users (which always matters). And I’ve made some outrageous, grandmother of all evil (and largely unsubstantiated) assumptions, but it’s not out of the realms of possibility. Far from it, in fact – it’s a definite six-pint maybe.

And in this crazy, social media obsessed, new dawn of a world, I’m afraid that’s about as much as you can ever hope for.

So says the official Twitter blog.

They also have an interesting (and we’ll assume definitive) chart that shows the top 10 most popular ways unique Twitter profiles use to access the service. Twitter.com is far and away the most popular method, but it’s quite a feat that Twitter For iPhone already has almost three times TweetDeck’s share – including TweetDeck for iPhone, too.

The following chart shows the top ten applications people have used to access Twitter in the last 30 days. This is based on number of unique users. That is, out of all the people who logged into their Twitter account during the month, what percentage did so via each service. (The total is more than 100% because people often use more than one app.)

It’s great to see this kind of variety and growth in the ecosystem as it moves beyond basic Twitter clients. These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities–both of which are critical to the long-term viability of the ecosystem. We’re making great progress in these areas–we currently have more than 145 million registered users and the performance of our Promoted Products has exceeded our expectations. But we still have lots of room to grow and improve. We look forward to seeing what’s next.

145 million users is a leap of some 20 million since I last wrote about this in June, a number likely assisted by the significant growth in mobile users (which is up 62% overall since mid-April). More importantly, the platform is running a lot smoother since those heady days, although to be fair we aren’t up against a World Cup, so it’s not the best of tests. Still, as Twitter says, onward and upwards.