Twitter Grows Almost 1000% In One Year, Surpasses Digg

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	22nd Jan 2009

Twitter Grows Almost 1000% In One Year, Surpasses Digg

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Apart from the formerly white obsessed feline fetishist there have been few companies able to buck the trend of falling, well... everything in this time of economic doom and gloom. That is apart from one, and rather spectacularly...

According to a pair of articles by analyst hitwise, UK traffic on micro blogging site Twitter has rocketed nearly ten-fold in a single year (974% to be exact) and now overtaken web bastion Digg in the US.

"Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK last year, and it shows no signs of slowing down," said hitwise analyst Robin Goad. "If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website."

This second point is actually a huge omission as one of the most popular ways of post a 'tweet' (a Twitter post limited to 140 characters) is via mobile phone clients and third party applications. In fact, as a fairly compulsive Twitterer myself I'd have to say that would personally eliminate about 95% of my use of the site.

Of course Twitter's profile has also been raised massively in recent times. It was used to show the first photo from the US Airway's Hudson River and it has become an increasingly popular soapbox for celebrities ranging from Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross to Barrack Obama (he of over 144,000 followers!), Andy Murray and even high profile porn stars! (There's a pun in there somewhere)

Naturally you can also find the TrustedReviews Twitter Feed which we've yet to publicise and Hugo and I are on there for our sins, though the other guys so far resist its allure (I know Andy may break soon). For anyone who hasn't yet tried Twitter, a word of warning: it's a fun and often very useful networking tool but it can also destroy more of your time than Facebook and instant messaging combined...

So how many of you guys are converts?

Links:
hitwise Robin Goad
hitwise Heather Dougherty

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Hugo said on 22nd January 2009

Ravmania, Twitter's use as a 'push' RSS feed is much underrated I feel.

James Morris said on 22nd January 2009

@Ravmania: I think, actually, the upswing is entirely explained by the number of Twitter postings by Hugo and Gordon in a single day. ;^>

Gordon said on 22nd January 2009

James could be right!

Gordon said on 2nd February 2009

This may interest a few: the first of a two part feature discussing my own thoughts on Twitter's development from my personal blog
http://gordonkelly.com/2009/02/02/twi... more

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