Nearly 75 Million People Visited Twitter's Site In January (comScore)

After hitting a flat spot last fall, Twitter’s worldwide growth is pointing in the right direction again. According to worldwide comScore figures released today, Twitter’s own site attracted 73.5 million unique individuals in January, up 8 percent from December, 2009 (when it had 65.2 million visitors). Its annual growth rate is still a phenomenal 1,105 percent. A year ago, Twitter.com attracted only an estimated 6 million visitors.

Large sites like Twitter and Facebook before it tend to grow in step-like patterns, with bursts of growth followed by periods of flatness during which the site absorbs its new users and adapts to their needs. Twitter has certainly been improving the functionality of its own site, with the rollout of new features such as local trends, a better suggested user list, Twitter Lists, and the Retweet button. Maybe all that work is starting to pay off.

ComScore only estimates activity on Twitter’s own site. Usage across other desktop, Web, and mobile apps may be twice as large as on Twitter itself. In January, CEO Ev Williams noted that the service had its best day ever, and Royal Pingdom estimates that it passed 1 billion Tweets a month in December, and grew to about 1.2 billion Tweets in January, 2009.