As the owner of a home improvement forum and the staff member of other types of forums, I can tell you that number is not all real people. Some are bots from search engines (believe it or not, there are actually hundreds of different search engines besides Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other standard fare) and some from spammers or email harvesters originating in countries like China, Russia, Philippines, Vietnam, the Koreas, India, and many, many others. I usually clear my visitor cache about once a year so that the number reflects a closer to realistic count based on the updates to my server's security measures to keep unwanted bots and spammers out.
Forum software also has a setting that can affect that number by increasing or decreasing the number of seconds or minutes before the session times out for each visitor. The longer the time, the larger the count. For instance, if it is set to timeout after 30 minutes, then an individual visitor will register as being online, even up to almost 30 minutes after they left. If you get an average of one new visitor per minute and the average stay is only 4 minutes, you could show as many as 34 people online when you actually only have 4 at that moment. If the timeout is set to 60 and everything else is the same, it could show as many as 64 visitors online, when you only have 4.
The main use of the "most users online" feature is attracting members. No one likes a dead forum. A visitor is more likely to stick around to check things out if it appears to be a popular forum.
Regardless, SegwayChat.com is the best forum of its type that I am aware of. Those 1,149 users may not all have been real people and they may not have all been online at the same moment, you won't find a Segway oriented forum with better or more accurate information.
R'gards,
Jim
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