On Tuesday we carried the news that Twitter’s site traffic (for all that number means) had overtaken MySpace’s. No great surprises there, we said. But that’s not the only site Twitter is trouncing, according to Hitwise director Robin Goad.
Twitter is also beating Bebo and Microsoft’s Bing, when you take into account estimated traffic from third-party clients like TweetDeck. Twitter is the 17th most-visited site in the UK and the second-most popular social network after Facebook, if you take third-party traffic into account.
We’ve known for some time that Twitter’s penetration in the UK is streets ahead of the US (at least since founder Ev Williams told us London was “the capital of Twitter”), but seeing the raw numbers still comes as a surprise given how young Twitter is. According to Goad, the UK is “often one of the first to adopt”, suggesting that we could see similar patterns in the US before too long.
If Goad’s estimate is anywhere near correct, Twitter is now more popular than the BBC’s iPlayer and Google Maps too.