WASHINGTON, US - MICRO-BLOGGING service Twitter is gaining 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts a day and most of its users have joined this year, according to a study released on Tuesday.

Internet marketing company HubSpot, in a 'State of the Twittersphere' report, said 70 per cent of the estimated four to five million people using Twitter have signed up in 2008 and 20 per cent have joined in the last 60 days.

It said the average user has been on the real-time short-messaging service for about 275 days.

'A year ago Twitter was a relatively small community of techies and Web 2.0 geeks, now it is going mainstream,' the report said.

'Twitter is not only being talked about and used by a lot more people, but more and more marketing industry events and conferences are using Twitter as a standard means of communication,' it said.

HubSpot said 35 per cent of Twitter users have 10 or fewer 'followers' - people who subscribe to receive their 140-characters-or-less messages - while nine percent of Twitter users follow no one at all.

The average number of followers for a Twitter user is 70, it said, and the average person follows 69 people.

The report said Twitter traffic was the highest on Wednesdays and Thursdays and dropped off by about 30 per cent over the weekend.

Launched in August 2006, Twitter has been embraced by a number of celebrity users including Mr Barack Obama, who racked up more than 150,000 followers during the US presidential campaign, and four-time NBA champion Shaquille O'Neal of the Phoenix Suns.

Twitter users have also made news recently by providing lightning fast on-the-scene updates from events such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Over the weekend, a Twitter user was on a Continental Airlines jet which skid off a runway at Denver airport.

He fired off a 'tweet' after safely exiting the plane: 'Holy f****ng s**t I wasbjust in a plane crash!' -- AFP