As an avid Twitterer, I’ve noticed that there was a surge in trafifc on the micro-blogging platform and the number of users have increased significantly as compared to a few months ago when the US Presidential election was going on. According to Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter, there are around 4-5 million active users currently tweeting about their social life and sharing interesting links with their friends. Some celebrities such as Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rose and Britney Spears use it to convey messages to their fans.
From the graph by Google Trends, it shows that more search queries about Twitter were being made on Google and it is heading up north steeply starting from the last quarter of 2008 as compared with its fellow Web 2.0 pioneers which includes Digg, Flickr and Delicious. Flickr, which was represented by the orange line, is moving at a steady pace whereas for social voting system Digg and social bookmarking website Delicious, it seems to be dying. I believe that Twitter will continue to “kill” its rivals (those which I’ve mentioned above) but overtaking the world’s most popular social networking website Facebook seems impossible as the Palo Alto, California-based company still continues to grow healthily.
Besides grabbing information from Google Trends, I’ve made some research on Alexa too even though it’s widely known as an inaccurate tool by many bloggers. For Twitter, it has done pretty well with an upward trend and currently, it’s ranked #314 and a yesterday traffic rank of 213. As for both Digg and Delicious, they tend to be heading south rapidly just like the current NASDAQ Stock Market.
Created in 2006, Twitter has emerged from just a SMS service to a world-renowned social platform that even US President Barack Obama make use of it to win the election. Also, an average of 2,000,000 tweets are posted daily with about 66,000 at its peak hour according to a real-time statistics service by TweetRush.
Link of Google Trends Graph: http://tinyurl.com/d9s93k
Original Idea from Lior Levin: http://twitter.com/liors