Twitter has seen UK traffic grow 93% in the first half of 2009 as popularity of the micro-blogging site escalates, according to Hitwise.

During May, Twitter ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network, compared with May 2008 when it was the 969th most visited site and 84th most visited social network.

The research also found Twitter is the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for one in every 350 site visits on average.

Over half (55.9%) of trafic from Twitter is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs and news and entertainment sites. However, just 9.5% of Twitter's downstream traffic is sent to transactional sites.

Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise, said, "Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high-profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher, have come rolling in.

"If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we're only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website," he added. "If we included people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third-party applications, such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck, the numbers could be even higher."

Source: NMA

Labels: twitter

According to a new study by Sysomos, a social media analytics company based in Toronto, people with 100 followers send out an average of 2.4 Tweets per day, while those with 1,800 followers Tweet an average of 10.2 a day.

Sysomos also looked at 11.5 million Twitter accounts and concluded that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce 86 percent of the Tweets.

More broadly, 50 percent of people on Twitter send out updates less than once a week. But 36 percent of the accounts Sysomos tracks send out Tweets every single day. So about a third of people on Twitter are fairly active, dedicated users. While half are more passive desk potatoes, Tweeting less than once a week.

Reported in TechCrunch, the data is interesting not only in terms of usage but also in terms of the need for rigour in research. I wonder how skewed the data is from which the first highlight is derived? I bet they didn't delete the outliers.

Labels: twitter

I have long held the opinion that the days of web sites are numbered, and PeopleBrowsr is another example of this. PeopleBrowsr is a free Adobe AIR-powered desktop app that integrates Twitter, Facebook and other social networks into one platform.

Similar to Tweetdeck, PeopleBrowsr uses stacks. To add content, you add different stacks for each social network, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and your RSS feeds. Peoplebrowsr lets you do all the normal twitter activities (read, post, follow/unfollow, DM and reply), but you can also update your Facebook status and engage in FriendFeed conversations from the dashboard.

This story appears at TechCrunch.

Labels: Adobe, PeopleBrowsr, twitter

Today, I read that Hubspot, the company that brought us Twitter Grader has just launched Facebook Grader. Each makes the grand claim of being able to tell you your "reach and authority" for that social network. So now you can find out just how 'important' you are at the click of a button (apparently, I'm about mid-way - 65/100 on Twitter - not very important at all).

Aside from how this importance is ascertained and how one's importance is reduced to a quantitative statistic, Grader reminds us of just how differently we are able to view ourselves in this global digital world. Firstly, one's importance is derived not from what one says and does, but rather with whom we communicate and how often. I could be spewing out drivel, but if I'm following you or you're a 'friend', then hey presto, I'm important. Secondly, this type of service reflects how online social networking allows us to partially fulfill that narcissistic desire to find out what other people *really* think about us. With online social networking (alongside search engines) it suddenly becomes very easy to read what others, including our friends, are saying about us or see what photos they are posting of us (or not). We can see where we are positioned in relation to other members in our social networks, see who is linking to us, discussing us, how often and with whom, and what they are communicating. Do others exclude us from conversations, or are we right at their centre? Are we the subjects of communications, or just ignored.

Social networking reminds me of the games I used to play when I was a child with my little plastic toy soldiers. I had loads of them, and I could set them up in any variety of positions and see what was going on from my position above the battlefield. With social networking, we too can see the 'grand' view of what's going on. However, unlike my childhood games, it's a little less easy to manipulate our social networks, and we certainly can't just break them all up and put them away in a box. Further, we may not always want to know where we stand with our social networks and what people are saying about us. But as Oscar Wilde said, there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about.

Labels: facebook, facebook grader, hubspot, oscar wilde, social networking, twitter, twitter grader