Twittering is a popular pastime for those who like to update their daily thoughts and activities, as well as for  voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets. This year, the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time since its launch ranked #84 (one above Digg at #85) in Computers and Internet category. A big driver of traffic to Twitter recently focused around the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River, driving many posts and updates about the situation. One photo of the plane (above) taken by Janis Krums, was viewed more than 43,000 times  via a Twitter photo-sharing site and was subsequently used across a number of traditional media outlets.

A major shift that has increased traffic to Twitter from Internet users comes from the  25-34 age category.  During the same time frame last year, 12% of Twitter’s traffic was represented by those aged 25 to 34, which has increased to nearly 45% for the 4 weeks ending Jan 17, 2009. By comparison, Digg’s share of visitors aged 25 to 34 was 20% during the same time frame.

Also interesting is the Twitter clickstream. Where Digg relies heavily on traffic from Google (38.8% recently) Twitter receives a higher share of traffic from social networks, which is mostly due to applications which integrate the services. For example on Facebook, the Twitter application has over 104,000 active users where status updates can be linked to Twitter updates.

A caveat is that a significant amount of twitter activity takes place on mobile devices (especially since there are several twitter apps for the iPhone), which is not measured here, so the impact of Twitter is actually higher than solely web visits. The market share of visits for Twitter includes the search.twitter. com domain, and visits to the search feature on Twitter are growing as well.

Twitter in the UK
UK internet traffic to mirco-blogging service and social network Twitter has risen 10-fold over the last 12 months, new figures show. For the week ending mid January, www.twitter.com ranked as the 291st most visited website in the UK, up from a ranking of 2,953 in the equivalent week last year.
 
UK internet traffic to the website has increased by 974% over this period, according to online competitive intelligence service Hitwise UK director of research, Robin Goad. "Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK last year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website.
 
”If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers could be even higher.
 
“Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now."
 
Although Twitter receives the largest amount of its traffic from the US, its penetration is greater in the UK, Hitwise has calculated. "In Britain Twitter is still most popular with younger users in urban areas, but its appeal is broadening as it grows," said Goad. "The fastest growing age group of users is 35-44 year olds, who now account for 17.3% of UK's www.twitter.com visitors."
 
The amount of traffic Twitter sends to other websites has also increased some 30-fold over the last 12 months. Almost 10% of Twitter's downstream traffic goes to news and media websites, and BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk) is currently the seventh most popular site visited after www.twitter.com.
 
A further 17.6% of traffic goes to entertainment websites, while 14.6% goes to social networks, 6.6% to blogs and 4.5% to online retailers.
 
"As a source of traffic Twitter is still in its infancy, but it is becoming more important every day," said Goad. "A number of news sites, blogs, and video and picture websites already rely on Twitter for a significant amount of their traffic."
 
The most popular website visited after Twitter is Facebook. The UK's most popular social network continues to pick up users and is now the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK.

Scotland has Twitterer journal & twoTwestivals
An online newspaper for users of the social networking service, Twitter, has been set up by a former chief sub-editor of the Scottish Sun. Following a trial edition in January - James McIvor (right) has launched ‘the all tweet journal’.

Usually, McIvor - operating as Scooped! - is producing spoof newspaper front pages as birthday, wedding and going-away gifts. After a trial last week, the all tweet journal was officially launched yesterday.

Says McIvor: “I have been on Twitter for almost a year and used it initially to promote Scooped! but found it to be a great way of networking with others.

“I was of the view that it would be good to bring out an online twitter newspaper where people can message me their news and we publish the best. The plan is to bring out the newspaper once a week but early indications would suggest there is scope to bring it out daily.

“The newspaper will feature one advert/promotion and one lead story with a picture element. As there is only one splash a day (or week) we will have to be selective with what we publish. We hope that advertisers will soon see the merit of promoting their product on the all tweet journal.”

Twestivals
Edinburgh's and Glasgow, along with 52 other European cities, ranged from Amsterdam to Würzburg are hosting separate 'Twestival' on the 12th February, with charitable witterers getting together for some food, booze and more networking.

Sources:http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1098.1464412850
http://www.travelmole.com/
http://thealltweetjournal.wordpress.com/
http://www.affiliates4u.com/profiles/makingthenews/
http://twestival.com/