Twitter overtakes Digg as traffic grows 974 per cent in a year

Two almost back-to-back mega media events, a US Airways jet crash-landing into the Hudson River with no casualties, and Barack Obama taking over as the first non-white American president of the United States of America seem to have driven traffic to Twitter in volumes that were otherwise impossible – and in the bargain, elevated it to erstwhile unseen levels.

Internet analysis firm Hitwise says that is exactly what happened, with the microblogging service having surpassed the market share of the mega-hit content aggregation web service, Digg. Hitwise says Twitter now ranks at 84 in the computers and internet category, a notch higher than Digg.

Reports said that Hitwise partly attributes Twitter's ascent up the rankings to the US Airways plane crash in to the Hudson River last week, which saw numerous posts and updates about the situation, besides publicity generated by one photo of the plane taken by Twitter user Janis Krums, which had been posted on TwitPic.com.

TwitPic is a service that allows mobile Twitter users to post photographs to their "tweets", and reports said that the solitary photograph of the downed US Airways plane was viewed to the point that it brought down TwitPic's servers for some time.

Hitwise opined that the broad rise of social media was in part responsible for fuelling Twitter's recent success, as a number of Twitter's users came aboard from other social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. A large chunk of traffic to content aggregation site Digg, on the other hand, comes from search provider Google.

In terms of demographics of the users of Twitter, Hitwise was reported to have said that a large chunk of the users of the service, almost 45 per cent, comes from those aged between 25 – 34, as against 12 per cent in terms of a year-on-year comparison.