Twitter statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in year

Robin Goad, Research Director of Hitwise UK revealed some interesting statistics regarding the growth of Twitter today.

Writing on his Hitwise blog, Goad reported UK traffic to the micro-blogging site has increased 22-fold in the last 12 months. That growth has meant that Twitter.com has leapt from the 969th most visited site (May ‘08) in the UK to 38th (May ‘09). The most impressive aspect of that growth is the fact that 93% of it has come in the first five months of 2009 alone.

As Goad rightly pointed out, that number in all likelihood should be even higher if you factor in the vast number of third party applications such as Seesmic, Tweetdeck and Twitterific that people use to access Twitter remotely.

Top 10 Brands Account for 45% of UK Internet Time

According to figures released by Nielsen Online this week, the 10 most heavily used brands accounted for 45% of total UK Internet time in April.  The top two brands – Facebook and MSN / Windows Live (Hotmail) – accounted for 11 billion of the 48 billion minutes that us Britons spent online.
The Top 10 brands [...]

Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market?

Depending on your Twitter Follow list, you may have already seen the buzz over changes to Google Profiles recently. Whilst the product has been around for a while (in relative obscurity), two recent announcements have fixed the spotlight firmly upon it.

First off was a relatively low key announcement a few weeks ago, revealing that you could personalize your Google Profile URL to include your name (nicely termed a vanity URL). Then followed an announcement that Profiles are to start appearing in the Google search listings.

Cue a whole bunch of savvy people flocking to Google to ensure they could secure their ideal vanity url before someone sharing their name (or a cybersquatter) grabbed it. The news from Danny Sullivan that Google Profiles pass PageRank might just have contributed to the rush.

Since then there has been a lot of speculation regarding Google’s intent with its Profiles. A popular theory is that it is the start of a manoeuvre to take on the social network giants, Facebook and LinkedIn. There are many arguments for and against such theories, but it would certainly be quite a feat to unseat either colossus when you consider their size and integration into their users’ lives.

So what else could Google Profiles become?