Twitter has grown by more than 3,000% in the last year,
according to figures from internet monitoring site Hitwise.
Its share of UK traffic increased about 33 times between
February 2008 and February 2009.
The site is growing 25 times faster than Facebook, which grew by
123% in the same period.
Twitter has a long way to go before it catches up, however, as
Facebook still gets 52 times more traffic than Twitter does. Much
of Twitter's traffic comes from third-party applications or mobile
devices, rather than directly through the website, but even once
this has been taken into account, Facebook still gets about 20
times more traffic.
Twitter's UK traffic has now overtaken traffic to the homepages
of the UK's major newspapers, including the Guardian, Telegraph and
the Sun. Only the Daily Mail homepage is currently beating the
micro-blogging site.
Robin
Goad, research director at Hitwise said, "One of the reasons
for Twitter's success is the 'eco-system' of sites and applications
that it has created via its open API. One of the most notable is
Twitpic, which essentially allows users to upload pictures to their
Twitter profiles."
There was a notable increase in traffic to Twitter after well
known figures such as Barack Obama, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross
started using the site.