Did you know that Twitter now has around half a billion registered profiles, with over 100 million in the USA alone?

What if I told that, collectively, Twitter users now send 175 million tweets every day? And that the most popular events on Twitter generate (literally) tens of thousands of tweets every second?

These statistics, and more, can be found in this Twitter visualization from Infographic Labs, which reminds us of the sheer size of the network in 2012.

Other key takeaways include:

• While the USA leads the way, Twitter is also massively popular in Brazil, Japan and the UK
• Twitter’s most-followed user, Lady Gaga, is rapidly closing in on 20 million followers
• 64 percent of users access Twitter via Twitter.com
• Tweets containing (the somewhat vague) ‘interesting content’ are most likely to be retweeted
• 69 percent of users follow others based on recommendations from friends

Some of this data is a little behind the times – Twitter moves really, really fast – but this is a great one-shot overview of Twitter in 2012.

(Source: Infographic Labs. Twitter bird via Shutterstock.)