The scrappy start-up status of the four-year-old microblogging service Twitter is now a thing of the past – the company has finally come out as a big company, which is now not only more polished and money-spinning, but also controversial and competitive!

While the new features – like geo-location services, a database of places, additional metadata for posts, and @anywhere service - announced by Twitter at its recent ‘Chirp’ developers’ conference aim at making the service increasingly useful, they also place Twitter in direct competition with other popular Web companies, like Facebook and Foursquare.

Noting that Twitter has gone “from a data play to a platform play,” Jeremiah Owyang - a partner at digital strategy consulting firm Altimeter Group – said: “You’re seeing the same behavior that Facebook, Google and other online communities have done. This is a natural evolution of a Web company.”

That Twitter is treading the path of rapid growth is evident from the recently-disclosed figures pertaining to usage of the service – the site already has over 106 million registered users, with about 300,000 new users signing up every day. As many as 55 million posts are written daily by Twitter users; and nearly 180 million people read these posts every month.

Interestingly, 75 percent of the Twitter traffic comprises people who use the more than 100,000 apps built by developers, rather than using by directly using Twitter. com!