Information Technology

Twitter breaks into web Top 40 as UK’s fastest growing website

(TIMESONLINE) - Twitter is the UK’s fastest growing website, breaking into the top 40 most visited sites in Britain for the first time.

The micro-blogging site has seen a huge rise in popularity in recent months, experiencing a 22-fold increase in traffic in the past year, according to Hitwise, the internet analysts. Twitter is now the 38th most visited site in the UK. At the same time last year it was 969th.

Robin Goad, Hitwise research director, said: “The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it has occurred during 2009. Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high-profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher, have come rolling in.”

Twitter’s profile continues to grow rapidly and it has been used as a key communications tool for Iranians protesting about the disputed presidential elections. Twitter provided the first witness reports of the Mumbai terrorist attacks and plane crashes in Denver earlier this year.

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