This is true. I crawled the twitter graph back in Dec 07 as part of my research on social networks (which is coincidentally on HN currently), and I was shocked

This is true. I crawled the twitter graph back in Dec 07 as part of my research on social networks (which is coincidentally on HN currently), and I was shocked by how few users they had (at least in the giant connected component, which is really all that counts.) The numbers that were being thrown around by Arrington and co. were ten times greater. Twitter has indeed received an amazingly positive coverage, if not for which it would have taken them far longer to get to their current user count (and who knows if they would have had enough cash in the bank in that case?)