How many Twitter users are there?

I was playing around with the twitter API and I found a way to find the exact number of Twitter users.

Note: The number of twitter users is continuously increasing by dozens every second, however it will still be accurate at the time of this writing for the higher order digits.

The number of twitter users is 79.7 million at this time.

Note: This doesn’t exclude the users who have been banned by the system or who opted to delete their account.

I haven’t detailed the exact method for determining them as Twitter spammers may misuse the tecnique, though I suspect many of them already are.

The last twitter user at the time of this writing (will be obsolete even before the post is published) is Nancy MacKenzie ( @NancyMacKenzfn ).

The key question however is how many of these are active users.