In August, Twitter, the four-year-old micro-blogging service flew past MySpace in unique visitors to become the No. 3 social networking service in the world, according to new data from comScore Inc. Twitter recorded almost 96 million unique visitors in August, up 76% from August 2009, comScore said. During the same period of time, MySpace dropped 17% during the same period, to 95 million unique visitors in August.
The Wall Street Journal reports Twitter is expected to gain visitors from a redesign of its website Twitter.com. Twitter hopes people will notice the site is more like Facebook’s. It also hopes to draw users who access Twitter through third-party applications such as TweetDeck. While Twitter redesigns its website MySpace is re-branding itself as the place to try out new music and entertainment, and a platform for musicians to interact with fans. MySpace is also working on overhauling its home page.
Twitter and MySpace were left in the dust by Facebook, which grew by 54% to 598 million unique visitors in August, and Microsoft’s Windows Live Profile, which integrates with the company’s web-based email and other services and had more than 140 million visitors. Facebook flew past MySpace back in early 2008 to take the top spot globally, according to comScore data. Windows Live Profile has been growing at a pace of about 10% per year. For the past year Google’s Orkut service has remained flat, at about 55 million visitors, with most users being located in India and Brazil.
Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman said, “While we generally don’t comment on third-party statistics, the growth measured by others doesn’t surprise us. We’re seeing 370,000 new accounts a day.”
