It's Official: Twitter Is More Popular Than Britney

Not a day goes by without hundreds of mentions of Twitter on blogs and TV (we’re as guilty as anyone), which naturally leads those still puzzled by the service or simply curious to learn more to search for it in Google. Those searches have been growing at a faster rate than even the service itself. In fact, the term “Twitter” seems to be one of the fastest growing search terms of all these days.

How popular is it? More popular than “britney.” Twitter surpassed “Britney” a few months ago, and has even caught up to “Obama” (actually it is slightly ahead right now), according to Google Trends. That is remarkable, given that Britney was one of the most searched for words of all last year. Still, maybe the switch says more about her than about Twitter. (Obama’s popularity as a search term has come down to more reasonable levels after huge spikes last November and during the inauguration).

Twitter is still dwarfed by Facebook, both on terms of traffic and as a search term. According to Google Trends, the keyword “facebook” is 81 times more popular than “twitter.” In terms of news references, however, the two are much closer. In the chart below, the top graph is search volume, and the bottom one is news references:

Finally, if you look at the Google Trends for Websites graph for Twitter.com, it looks like there is a tiny dip at the end there. After a period of such torrid growth, it certainly deserves to take a breather. But it cannot afford to take too much of a breather, otherwise people will stop talking about it and Britney will have her revenge.