توییتر : هیچ اهمیتی ندارد که تعداد کاربران اینستاگرام از توییتر بیشتر شده است

Instagram just announced that the service is up to 300 million monthly active users. Of course, the minute a social-networking site throws down new figures, everyone is quick to adjust the rankings on their lists to figure out which sites are now most popular (and by how much).

In this case, many were quick to point out that Instagram’s achievement now means the site has more monthly active users than Twitter, which recorded 284 million active users about six weeks ago. That’s a statistic Twitter doesn’t seem to want to think about—at least, that’s our assumption given the response of company co-founder Evan Williams when Fortune’s Erin Griffith asked about the difference.

“If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this real-time information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter—important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a s**t if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures,” Williams said.

Them’s fighting words.

To his credit, Williams does take a correct amount of offense at just how the phrase “active monthly user” is defined in the social-networking space. Facebook, for example, seems to count just about anything for “monthly active user” status—you could not pull up the Facebook app at all, but innocently like or share content from a third-party site or app, and that qualifies you as a monthly active user. Are you really using Facebook? Not quite. At least, not in the “spend 5 minutes each hour checking statuses and photos” sense. But you’re using it just enough to count for the metric, so there you go.

“So what does that mean? It’s become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we’re on the wrong path,” Williams said.

The solution? A new measurement! At Twitter’s first-ever analyst day today, the company made sure to note that Twitter might have 284 million active users, but it has a lot more people who look at tweets around the Web even if they’re not logged into Twitter itself. And that audience is a bit bigger: 500 million people or so, which Twitter hopes to reach out to with new features (and, of course, new monetization schemes).

Among the proposed new features includes a new “Timeline Highlights” option that highlights popular posts that would have otherwise been buried on users’ Twitter feeds since the last time they were on the site.

For more, check out PCMag’s roundup of Twitter tips in the slideshow above.