With 400 Million Tweets Per Day, Twitter Spending “Inordinate Resources” On Improving Co

Twitter is devoting “an inordinate amount of resources and time” to improve content discovery for its users — a challenge that’s no doubt made more difficult by the service’s growing userbase and increased tweet activity.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told a conference audience this week that Twitter is now seeing more than 400 million tweets per day, up from the 340 million figure that the company revealed in March.

CNET reported Costolo’s comments from a conference put on by The Economist:

Costolo was somewhat more forthcoming about mining the data trove it collects. “The fascinating thing about big numbers is you get macro trends and events, and incredible personal moments where you have to dive all the way to see things,” he said. He did discussed how Twitter is focused on simplifying the user interface and surfacing the “pulse of the world” with the Discovery component.“We are spending an inordinate amount of resources and time improving that…and it will use all the signals you provide to personalize the discover component,” Costolo said.

Twitter has made a number of recent improvements related to discovery. In the space of a couple weeks last month, Twitter announced changes to the “Discover” tab involving personalized signals, and followed up with the launch of personalized “Best of Twitter” email digests that are being sent out weekly to help users see the most popular content in their network. (Twitter also announced improved “who to follow” suggestions last month.)

Costolo also said that mobile activity is surpassing the desktop on several fronts, including — at least once — ad revenue.

We have an ad platform that is already inherently suited to mobile. Even though we launched the ad platform on the Web already, a couple of weeks ago we saw mobile revenue in a day greater than non-mobile.

The company has previously said that 55 percent of active users are mobile.

I’ve long believed that the word “mobile” is something of a misnomer because, let’s face it, when I’m sitting on my couch with a beverage in one hand and my iPad in the other, watching the Seattle Mariners while also browsing Twitter … I’m not very “mobile” at that moment. But whether we need a better word or not, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Twitter is experiencing growth away from the desktop.