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The quest to decipher just how many actual users there are of Twitter continues. Yesterday at the Chirp conference being held for Twitter developers, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the group that the number of registered users (let’s call them accounts) is 105 million. That is considerably more the 65 million that comScore has estimated the number at. Macworld reports

Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter’s Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience of just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter’s user base at 65 million.

Twitter is preparing to move to a dedicated data center by the end of this year. If it allows for Twitter to be more stable then this can’t happen soon enough. Why should marketers concern themselves with this kind of information? It’s pretty simple. If the Twitter platform cannot be relied on to be consistently up and reliable then it is much harder to have valuable resources dedicated to efforts using Twitter. If you think companies are skittish now about whether Twitter is the “way to go” these recent technological missteps are not helping to ease that pain.

TechCrunch reports

We have been talking a great deal lately about how Twitter should be monetizing their service. Most of this talk comes after news that Twitter secured $20 million in venture capital, to push its total valuation to $250 million. It wasn’t long ago that Twitter started looking for a product manager to define a revenue stream. This is a smart move for a company that has relied solely on venture capital from day one.

Andy recently wrote a post detailing his thoughts for a Twitter subscription program. This is an idea that even Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams has spoken about in the past.

The nerve! How dare those guys at Twitter even consider first booting all third party ad networks to the curb. Now they think they can charge publishers who are making money from the Twitter stream too! At least that’s what their new terms and conditions state in a truly less than clear manner, which is the Twitter way. I say more power to them.

All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka took the initial reaction from yesterday a step further by seeing just where Twitter may be heading with this whole generating revenue distraction.

Twitter isn’t just booting other ad networks out of its stream. It now plans to tax some start-ups and publishers that are making money from the service.

Twitter took a big step toward claiming their territory (which, after all, they created) regarding what advertising will or will not appear in the Twitter stream. The short answer is that no third party ads will appear there so the Promoted Tweets program introduced by Twitter will be the sole provider of advertising.

This is potentially bad news for several companies including Ad.ly and Twad.ly whose models were built , at least in part, around the ability to advertise in the Twitter stream. TweetUp has responded that they never intended to advertise in stream anyway.

Here is information via the Twitter blog and TechCrunch regarding Twitter’s decision.

As Internet marketers and social media users / practitioners we are always digging and trying to find out more. Since most of what is related to social media is happening on the fly the innovation comes more often from good intention rather than good planning. One common theme that occurs, however, is the apparent lack of understanding of social media and its business impact in the upper levels of most companies.

In particular, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) gets the brunt of the complaints of “They don’t get social media!” or “They are afraid of what they don’t know!” This is true in a lot of cases. That is changing, though, with the help of people like Kent Huffman, CMO of BearCom Wireless. Haven’t heard of BearCom? You’re not alone but that is changing through Kent’s efforts on Twitter and his campaign to bring the CMO to the social media discussion before his / her average 23 month tenure expires.