If you’ve installed the Alexa toolbar on your Firefox browser, you’d noticed that Twitter, the world’s most popular micro-blogging platform has been experiencing rapid growth since it became popular in 2007 (all thanks to celebrities using the social website and massive news coverage). A week ago, Twitter’s Alexa rank was hovering around 300+ but today, I’ve just realized that it has increased to #74 for its 3 month average rank! This is indeed a pretty impressive feat! Besides that, the graph from Alexa has clearly shown that Twitter’s traffic is still growing at an “exponential” rate, probably even much faster than its rivals.
Currently, its Yesterday rank shows #53 whereas its 7 day average rank is under the #50 mark of #48. Also, Alexa has reported a -396 3 month change in ranking. Some other information from Twitter includes the percentage of users using the platform. According to Alexa, 48.1% users are from the United States and the next highest traffic source is Germany (8.9%). Each user spends around 9.3 min/day on the site and this is still far away from Facebook whereby users fork out 25.4 minutes everyday to interact with friends or play games. What surprised me was that the percentage of global Internet users who visit Twitter stands at 1.08%, a 487.7% change as compared to 3 months ago!
On the other hand, social giant Facebook which is ranked #5 on Alexa has attracted an astounding 16.72% of Internet users worldwide. However, its 3 month growth of 31.2% is still much slower as compared to Twitter. Facebook has recently reported that it has reached its 200 million users mark has shown no signs of slowing down and the numbers are still heading north despite the recent grumbling of the new layout by the folks at Facebook.
If Twitter continues to grow healthily, it may even tail closely behind rivals Facebook and Myspace in terms of Alexa rank soon, maybe a few months later or next year. I believe that it will enter the top 10 most popular websites in the world category in the near future because of its rapid growth. However, Twitter is still vulnerable to security issues (the recent Mikeyy worm) as the number of employees is really too few (33) to keep an eye and solve the problems. Also, the folks at Twitter must come up with a business model as quickly as possible in order to meet the demands in the future as they simply could not rely on investments all the time.