"We saw a decline in monthly active usage in Q4, but we've already seen January monthly actives bounce back to Q3 levels," the company said in its earning statement.
Many apps including Microsoft's Bing, MapQuest and Waze saw a 60percentt increase in daily active usage after Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized for glitches in the company's new app.
This free dyno was immensely successful in driving active usage metrics — hobbyists and students loved the fact that they could create web apps for free.
He also noted that the company's had eight consecutive quarters of growth in daily active usage, although that statistic doesn't tell the whole story, with recent quarters indicating that the company continues to struggle with overall user growth.
The original Farmville was around for about eight months before it peaked in monthly active usage, but that was before Zynga had amassed its network of players on the Facebook platform.
"This quarter we saw a return to sequential growth in monthly active usage, driven by seasonality and marketing initiatives," said Anthony Noto, Twitter's chief financial officer.
Facebook says that it generated half of its revenues outside of the U.S. and Canada in the first quarter of 2012, and some numbers out today underscore just how extensive its reach is in different markets, with active usage in some countries outstripping that of Facebook in its home market.
In terms of active usage, around 80,000 of the kits have been activated, and a third of users are still checking in weekly four months after activating a kit — retention rates Klein describes as "quite good for a product of this nature".
While this summer Instagram said its monthly active users had hit 500M, doubling its active usage in two years.
