TORONTO — If you thought Twitter was big now -- with more than 190 million members and 65 million tweets sent daily -- just wait until soccer-mad web users get a hold of it during the World Cup.

The people behind the popular social networking site are counting down the days to the start of the World Cup on Friday. They believe the massive sporting event will spur the most-significant flurry of online activity they've ever dealt with.

"The World Cup is probably the biggest organized human event on the planet, with more people paying attention to the same thing at the same time -- for a whole month!" said Twitter spokeswoman Robin Sloan in an email interview with The Canadian Press.

"The last World Cup was in 2006, when Twitter was still a nascent service with thousands of users -- so this is really the first time Twitter and the World Cup have converged."

Big events typically take over the conversation on Twitter, the company said in a recent blog post. During this year's Super Bowl, almost half the tweets posted were about the big game, and that event gets much less international attention.

"Where the Super Bowl is U.S.-centric, the World Cup is global, and increasingly, so is Twitter," the post said. While Twitter was once dominated by American users, its international membership has now surpassed 60 per cent of all accounts.

Tweets about soccer have already been spotted on trending topics lists and are likely to multiply once the World Cup kicks off on June 11, said Ingo Muschenetz of Whatthetrend.com, which tracks Twitter traffic.

"The World Cup is a worldwide sporting event that lasts for (a month) and basically inspires a tremendous amount of passion overseas," he said.

"I can easily see how the World Cup could make more impact on Twitter than any other event it's had so far."

The World Cup could represent Twitter's big international coming out party and result in sudden growth in nations consumed by soccer, said Mark Evans of Sysomos, a Toronto-based social media monitoring company.

"This is going to be unprecedented, I think, in terms of the amount of traffic we're going to see," Evans said.

"It's hard to quantify just how much but let's just say that given the world reach, it's going to be tremendous amounts of traffic and I hope Twitter's infrastructure can live up to the test."

Sloan said Twitter isn't expecting that traffic surges will be problematic.

"We're checking and double-checking our capacity -- although keep in mind that at this point, we're already handling more than 65 million tweets per day, so while the World Cup is indeed going to be huge, we're used to huge," she said.

And yet on Wednesday morning, Twitter users faced service outages and the so-called fail whale, an image of a cartoon whale that pops up when servers are overwhelmed.

According to a census of Twitter users conducted by Sysomos in January, the U.S. has the most members, followed by Brazil, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Australia, Netherlands, India, Japan and Mexico.

But countries like Brazil, Indonesia and Germany have been flying up the charts in the last year.

"The U.S. share has continued to decline fairly dramatically," Evans said. "U.S. usage is flat for the most part."