Twitter use rises massively – overtakes Digg in UK
Twitter is becoming increasingly popular and important, and more meaningfully for the company, breaking out of the niche it created for itself and instead entering the mainstream. Use and visitor numbers for the micro-blogging site are up around the world but the UK is showing signs of particularly strong growth.
The appeal of Twitter is plain to see. People whose lives are too busy for posting long and rambling posts on a personal blog can instead sign up for an account and update their followers regularly with short but short tweets. And even those of us who do write long blog posts like the freedom of expressing ourselves in as few words as possible from time to time.
Just before Christmas, there was a report published which showed that despite healthy growth Twitter was still niche. At the time I went along with that thought process but 10,000 new accounts being created daily can only be considered niche when compared to behemoths such as Facebook, with its new account numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Indeed, according to The Telegraph, Twitter is one the fastest growing Web sites in the UK, and that pattern is likely to be repeated in other territories. Hitwise reports that Twitter traffic increased by almost 1,000 percent during the course of 2008. Last January, it was the 2,953rd most popular site in the Great Britain. It is now the 291st most popular. This ranks it higher than Digg although the social media site is still more popular worldwide.
One of the areas being highlighted behind the growth is the use of Twitter as a news aggregation source. An increasing amount of stories are being broken on the site by citizen journalists at the heart of a story. By accessing Twitter via a mobile device or laptop, a huge story can make its way onto Twitter way before it reaches traditional news outlets.
Such was the case with the U.S. Airways plane crashing into the Hudson River last week. In this sense, Twitter is leading the case for citizen journalism becoming the next big thing, with traditional media unable to keep up. But those same media outlets are now using Twitter in an effort to steal a march on their rivals.
I must admit to falling in and out of using Twitter but as its use as a source for news expands, I’ll be sure to use it more regularly. And of course, as the service becomes more mainstream, it’ll become a more interesting place to be due to the sheer weights of numbers.
Related Posts:
January 23rd, 2009
If was about to die in an air plane crash, or just survived one, I’d think be thinking about things other than Twitter.