Twitter revealed its highly anticipated stock offering on Thursday, with the hugely popular messaging platform seeking to raise up to $1 billion on Wall Street.

The IPO is expected to be the most sought-after since Facebook in May 2012, a listing that faced numerous glitches on the Nasdaq and which saw the company's share price quickly slump before recovering this year.

Twitter will be keen to avoid such a calamitous debut and in announcing its plans published the first financial data about the platform, which is used by celebrities, journalists, politicians and millions of people around the world.

The California company said it had 218 million active users as of June 30, and had lost almost $80 million on nearly $317 million in revenue in 2012.

The public version of the IPO filing came three weeks after Twitter indicated it had filed a confidential document, taking advantage of a recent law designed to help emerging companies.

It will trade under the symbol TWTR, the filing said, without indicating on which exchange the stock will be bought and sold.

Private share transactions have valued the company at around $10 billion.

Twitter, which allows users to share messages of up to 140 characters, did not give a date for the IPO but said it would be as "soon as practicable."

"The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers," the IPO document said.

"Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve -- and do not detract from -- a free and global conversation."

Twitter said it has been growing rapidly, but the number of active users was not as high as some private estimates.

A chart in the IPO document showed Twitter had 218 million active users as of June 30, up from 151 million a year earlier.

"We have already achieved significant global scale, and we continue to grow," the document said.

"Our users create approximately 500 million Tweets every day."

Around 49 million of the current users are in the United States, the filing showed.

But while use has grown, Twitter has been losing money since 2010, which is as far back as the financial statements go.

It reported a 2010 loss of $67 million on $28 million in revenue; in 2011 the loss was $164 million on $106 million in revenue; and the 2012 loss was $79.4 million with revenues of $317 million.

Twitter said the loss for the first six months of 2013 was $69.2 million with revenues of $253.6 million.

Some 85 to 87 percent of its revenues come from advertising, mainly in the form of "promoted" or sponsored tweets.

Analyst Zachary Reiss-Davis, of Forrester Research, said Twitter's IPO indicated the firm would focus its "entire business on building rich and engaging content and experiences that connect users and marketers".

Twitter offered the customary caution for investors, saying it faces risks if conditions shift.

"We may face challenges in increasing the size of our user base, including, among others, competition from alternative products and services, a decline in the number of influential users on Twitter or a perceived decline in the quality of content available on Twitter," it said.

The research firm eMarketer has estimated that Twitter would bring in $582.8 million in global ad revenue this year, and nearly $1 billion in 2014.

Twitter, which launched in 2006, opened the door to advertisers in 2010 by allowing marketers to insert paid "promoted tweets" into user feeds.

It began mobile ads in 2012 and allowed advertisers to target users based on their geographic location or whether they access the service using mobile devices or personal computers.

Twitter said some 75 percent of its users access the the service from a mobile device. It also estimates that fewer than five percent of its accounts are fake or "spam" services.

The IPO will be underwritten by a consortium of investment banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Securities, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Allen & Company and Code Advisors LLC.