When I read Twitter CEO Evan Williams post tonight about the state of Twitter from a mobile perspective, the first thing that jumped out at me what that Twitter for Android, an app Twitter worked hard on, isn’t even in the top 10 most-used apps for the service. But Williams also used the post to whip out some impressive numbers. Chief among them: Twitter now has over 145 million registered users (though presumably less than 150 million, or he would have said that). And there are now nearly 300,000 registered apps in the Twitter ecosystem.

The latter number above is technically the number of registered OAuth apps in the ecosystem (and includes multiple instances of some apps). Twitter made the switch over from basic authentication to OAuth a few days ago, leaving behind some apps, such as the old Tweetie (which was reborn as Twitter for iPhone). Williams says this number of registered apps has tripled since their Chirp conference — which was only this past April.

Other big numbers thrown out there by Williams:

• Mobile users have jumped 62% since mid-April
• 16% of all new users to Twitter now start on mobile (it was 5% before Twitter started doing branded mobile clients)
• 46% of active users use some sort of mobile Twitter experience
• 78% of people who interact with Twitter still do so through twitter.com — though that number includes people who use more than one app
• m.twitter.com is the second most-used Twitter interface at 14%
• SMS and Twitter for iPhone are tied at 8%

Lastly, he throws in that Twitter’s Promoted Products (read: their first big monetization pitch) has “exceeded our expectations.” No word on if that means Twitter has turned a profit, but that seems pretty unlikely. Still, revenues are undoubtedly growing.

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Are you addicted to Twitter? Do you have an iPad? Even if the answer to both is “no” right now, after you see Twitter for iPad, those answers are going to change — quickly.

Yes, the wait is over. Launching tonight in the App Store is Twitter for iPad — the first official native iPad app from the company. We all knew it was coming (Twitter even said so a few months ago), but it has been a long wait. It was definitely worth it.

Like most people, I wander into hyperbole from time to time. But it has now been a few days since I first played with Twitter for iPad, and I still think it is hands-down the best iPad app out there. It’s that good. With all due respect to Reeder, Instapaper, Flipboard, and Pulse, this is now going to be my go-to app for just about everything related to reading news. It’s simply such a great experience for reading tweets — and more importantly, reading the links your friends share.

What Twitter has done is create an amazing user experience for reading information. This is thanks to an intuitive user interface that layers on top of itself. So, for example, if I click on a link in my tweet stream, I’ll have a new layer that rolls over to show that webpage in a customized browser window. If you’ve used Flipboard, it’s somewhat similar, but better because it’s much easier to go back to where ever you previously were before you clicked the link. You simply swipe something to the side to move it temporarily or swipe it again to get it off the screen (in portrait mode anyway, where there’s less space).

Something else that’s awesome: when you highlight a tweet by clicking on it, it’s now pinned to the top or bottom of the screen as you scroll through your stream. This is great if it’s something you want to reference. A lot of thought has been put into these type of saving state actions within this app. It’s simple to save a draft and go back to it, for example (much easier than with Twitter for iPhone). Or to reference one of these pinned tweets in your own tweet.

There are also some great new gestures that Twitter came up with for this app. For example, if you pinch-outward on a tweet, it will unfold to show you more information about the Twitter user. Better may be the way you can swipe down with two fingers on any tweet to see a full conversation in context. It’s the little things like this that make the app great — Apple-like, even.

Overall, the app looks and feels quite a bit different from Twitter for iPhone (which Twitter built from Tweetie — developer Loren Brichter’s client that they acquired earlier this year). But Twitter’s Leland Rechis assures me it’s using all the same stuff on the backend. In fact, Twitter is now a universal app — meaning it’s one app that will work on both the iPhone and iPad, it will just look different depending on which device you’re using it on.

Rechis also says Twitter started experimenting with some newer things on the iPad version that haven’t yet been brought to the iPhone version, but undoubtedly will. A great example here is that when you click through to a user’s profile page, you’ll see at the bottom a list of users similar to that user that you may like to follow.

Rechis also notes the importance of the logged-out view — something Twitter worked on before the iPhone version launch. Twitter wants to make the service as useful as possible to people even if they don’t have an account. The idea, of course, is that they’ll hopefully sign up for one — and this app may give them the most reason to yet. When logged out, you’ll be able to see tweet streams based on hot topics.

“Tweets in general are not just what I’m doing, they have an incredible amount of metadata,” Rechis says speaking to why they created this layering idea for the app. Almost 25 percent of all tweets now have a link in them, he says. This app is perfect for those tweets, and content consumption and exploration in general.

Rechis notes that one of his favorite things about tablets is how they eliminate window management. At the same time, you need some way to manage all this information. He notes that Brichter’s original concept was stacks of sheets of paper that you quickly shuffle through. Other members of Twitter including Rechis refined that idea and the end result is Twitter for iPad.

That’s roughly 750 words about the app — but you really just need to see it, and use it. It will definitely be my go-to way to browse Twitter from now on. It’s that good.

Look for it in the App Store shortly. It will be a free download.

Update: I should note that for some of these more advanced gestures, there is a slight learning curve. That said, you can do everything without using those gestures, so it’s not a big deal — it’s just icing on the cake. And yes, Twitter is trying to come up with the best way to teach users about these new gestures.

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Just as I was reading Paul Carr’s latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, he’d taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word “Font-o-licious.” It didn’t go viral. It didn’t become a trending topic. It didn’t get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted “I’m gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist” and started following my husband.

Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing  space-and-time. These moments don’t change the world, but they’re exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think people—even my close friends— who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong.

What made social media a phenomenon were moments like these. Passively connecting in-and-out of a persistent conversation with people you know and see everyday, people you know but have lost touch with, and people you don’t know but share interests with. People who in a more efficient world, you might have known. It’s about making relationships more efficient. My parents know what I’ve been up to by reading my Twitter feed, so when I call home I don’t have to answer a vague question like “What have you been up to?” I answer a specific question like “What country are you traveling to now?” If a friend is looking for a job at a given company, I can’t always remember who I know who works there, but with LinkedIn, I don’t have to. And seeing what an old flame looks like on Facebook never gets old.

If these selling points sound horribly cliché it’s because they are commonplace reasons most everyday people use these sites, and indeed, the same reasons why the founders of most social media companies started these sites. But the sites worked too well at amassing fans, friends and followers, creating micro-economies where people sought to cash in on their would-be fame and influence. And that is when the problems—and inevitably the fatigue— started. People competed for how many friends and followers they could rack up and how many RTs they could get in a day, seeing it as evidence of how cool or smart or influential they were. That’s when social media got mercenary and soulless.

Here’s a clue: If you find yourself saying “(Fill-in-the-blank-social-media-site) used to be soooooo much better before everyone was on it”– you are using the site wrong. You are following too many people, you are using it too much, you are strangling the pretty, little bunny. The beauty of these sites is you control how many friends you see, and how many of them see you. So if you used to love it and now hate it, well, you know what they say about when you point a finger. Three are pointing back at you.

Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What’s the value of a Retweet or a Like? It’s roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work.

Everyone touts stats showing that recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising. That’s because in the old world recommendations were inefficient. I had to be so moved by, say, the service at a restaurant, that I proactively called people to tell them about it, or it stuck in the front of my mind solidly enough that when someone asked “Where should we go to dinner?” it came flying out. The power of personal recommendation doesn’t carry over in a world where it’s as easy as clicking a button because the caliber of that recommendation is necessarily lowered by taking out barriers.

Of course not everyone becoming fatigued with social media whored themselves out to anyone who would follow or friend them, bartering likes and retweeting anyone who said something nice about them. Indeed, Mr. Carr locked his account and only followed a core group of friends. His biggest complaint was simply that he used it too much—updating any thought in his head so that he didn’t take time to mull and form that idea or joke until it was perfect, and that he was distracted. That’s a fair point.

But I wonder whether the flood of apps may be making the problem worse, not better. You can have too much of a good thing. After some early security glitches when Twitter desktop apps published direct messages, I decided to only use Twitter.com and update by text message to interact with the service.

That’s downright luddite in my TechCrunch/iPhone world, but by going to Twitter, rather than Twitter always flooding to me, I forced myself to keep my Twitter feed as manageable to keep up with as email. What’s more, when I travel to places like China or have a big deadline, I don’t log onto Twitter for weeks. When I come back it’s still here. Both Twitter and I continue to go about our lives without one another just fine.

I don’t think changing an avatar to green saves Iran. But I wouldn’t say Twitter is making us all more detached and stupid either. I just like life with social media better than life without it, for silly little moments like the one my husband had with Chank Fonts. Same thing I’d say about email or a mobile phone or TiVo or a Blackberry.

I realize that doesn’t make gripping blog copy like Twitter-democratizing-the-world or Twitter-totally-sucking, but I think for most of the average users out there, that’s the Twitter they know and the Twitter that will continue to steadily grow, all this hype and backlash aside.

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I’m so confused right now.

There’s this thing spreading around Twitter right now. It looks like it may be a virus — but it’s not. It’s just thousands of people all tweeting the same thing: “Sometimes I just want to copy someone else’s status, word for word, and see if they notice.” Some are retweets, but most are just people manually entering those words and sending them out to all their followers. I get it, it’s funny. But it’s not that funny. And yet, everyone seems to be doing it.

Why? Well, it seems to be more of a human nature/phycological thing than anything else. I’ve asked a number of people I know who actually did tweet those words why they did it. So far, they’ve all replied that they thought they were being cute and that they were the first to do it. That’s the thing, if you were the first to do this, it would be funny. And even if you only think you’re the first to do it, it’s funny. So in a way, it speaks to a unified sense of comedy. “It’s a beautiful thing,” says my colleague Robin Wauters, who yes, tweeted it out earlier.

Memes are obviously nothing new on Twitter. But most involve some sort of silly hashtag — or yes, a virus/bot that just spews out nonsense. This is different. This is human nature. It’s like if I tweeted out “don’t retweet this” — dozens of people automatically would. And that seems to be exactly what happened here, only those dozens also had dozens of other followers who did the same and those had dozens who did the same, and so on.

It’s like a naturally replicating human-made virus. It’s one that’s currently spreading across the world — each new instance speaking a little bit to how we’re all the same. It’s a beautiful thing.

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