Twitter has just reached an extremely significant milestone in the past week, and it’s been exemplified with the roaring buzz over Osama bin Laden’s death, confirmed in a statement from President Barack Obama late last night.  A representative of the social network announced that the number of accounts registered with the micro-blogging service has now surpassed 200 million. Katie Stanton, Vice President of International Strategy attended the Guardian Activate conference in New York, and delved a bit into the details behind that massive number.

According to her, there are now more than 200 million Twitter accounts worldwide and more than 70% of all Twitter’s traffic comes from outside the US.  That means Stanton’s job is very important and whatever her International Strategy is, it seems to be working. Roughly 25% of all tweets come from Japan alone, she said.”

Indeed, Twitter has seen a tremendous amount of growth all throughout its existence. The company took the form  we know today back in 2007 – the same year when tweets tripled at the SxSWi conference. But Twitter’s had to do a great deal in order to maintain site stability and service operations as it scaled up, struggling to meet user demand.  In 2008, Twitter made some architectural changes to better come with the outages (fail whale) it has experienced during MacWorld, and 2010 marked the creation of the 1 billionth tweet.

Twitter’s growth has been boosted through the years thanks increasing interest and more and more funding. Acquisitions represent the third element behind this growth. In 2008 the company acquired social networking search engine Summarize information management applications maker Values of n. These were followed by the 2009 buyout of Mixer Labs and a host of others, with one of the latest ones being TweetDeck. While not yet complete, we last heard the companies are amidst advanced talks  about a potential $50 million deal, which, if realized, would greatly add to Twitter’s big data and cloud efforts. In addition to a desktop client, TweetDeck’s social dashboard would have huge implications to Twitter’s big data analytics and targeting marketing monetization.