"Twitter"ing away (Part I)

Twitter has got more than its share of media coverage (if you compare it vis a vis other bigger sites like Yahoo, AOL and others. In fact if one were to create an index of the media versus the size/user base, Twitter would probably beat Facebook and Google at the indices.)

• Twitter is being used by News and Broadcating Corporations like BBC, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and others.
• The celebrity usage of Twitter is phenomenal. It starts with Barrack Obama's presidential campaign, to Lance Armstrong, Stephen Fry, Britney Spears and loads more.
• It created waves when the Janis Crums twittered the US airways flight 1549 crash at Hudson from his iPhone. (Coverage)
• Twitter was forever on news regarding its $35 million venture capital funding from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital. (Read News)
• Tech blogs such as Tech Crunch and social networking blogs such as Mashable heavily tweet through this medium.
• Firsthand Reports from California wildfires poured through Twitter in front of media and news agencies. (read Report)

Twitter now is world's most popular micro blogging platform, a compelling social service and very soon to be a mainstream channel.It upstaged fellow rivals and web 2.0 rivals such as Digg, Flickr, Delicious in terms of Google Search querries (as reported by Google Trends). The indication here is the first time usage would have been impacted in this manner. (First time users use Search engines to locate the services). Thus presumably, more people are joining twitter than its rivals.

Alexa Ranks also indicatesthat its reach has grown 6 times over in one and a half years (from .05% in October 2007 to .32% in Febraury 2009). Its page rank has improved from 4309 in October 2007 to 233 currently.
According to Compete, Twitter’s month-to-month change is an upward trend of 32.7% whereas for the year-to-year change, it’s 964.5%. For the month of February, it states that it has 8 million unique visitors using the platform
Quantcast, a service that only tracks websites based on the number of US people who have visited them, Twitter was ranked #163 and its monthly US people has reached 6.1 million, a 600% boost from August last year. Other stats include US Demographics of which 47% and 53% are male and female group respectively. Also, the main bulk comes from the 18-34 age group.

Real time, Twitter user and client statistics, shows that an average of 2 million tweets are posted by users on a daily basis. AN indication of the success of Twitter is the Twitterholic, which indicates the folowwings per user. These numbers have gone up dramatically over the past year and half. An example in question is CNN which had a 1000 daily visitors now has 10000 visitors per day.

The growth has been dizzying and from the looks of it, Twitter has caught the eye of technology geeks, Technology Cos (Facebook, Google, Microsoft). The growth doesnot seem like it is going to slow down any sooner.