More people tweeting sent Twitter’s stock soaring Tuesday. The online messaging service said monthly active users rose a better-than-expected 24 percent in the second quarter as it mostly succeeded in stemming a dwindling pace of growth. Twitter, which has battled to reverse a steady decline in its once-heady pace of user growth, grew users to 271 million, still dwarfed by rival Facebook's 1.3 billion. Timeline views, a measure of the engagement of its users, also exceeded expectations with a 15 percent increase. Twitter reported a 124 percent jump in quarterly revenue to $312 million, beating Wall Street's expectations for $283.1 million. Twitter posted a net loss of $144.6 million, or 24 cents per share, in the April-June period. That compares with a loss of $42.2 million, or 32 cents per share, a year earlier when Twitter was still a private company. Shares rose more than 30 percent in after-hours trading. Wall Street had been divided on whether Twitter can transform itself into a mainstream Internet platform on the same scale as Facebook.
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-Reuters and The Associated Press