Twitter ye not - microblogging comes of age

The day that Jeremy Clarkson started tweeting may have spelt the end of cool for the world’s most loved micro-blogging site, but the growth shows no signs of stopping.

It appears as if I am not the only one to have got into Twitter in a big way in the last three months.  Figures from Hitwise show traffic to the site increased by 974 per cent in the last year. And that’s just to the twitter.com site itself – many users tweet from their mobile phones or use applications like TweetDeck.

Also up is the amount of time people spend on the site – a threefold year on year rise to now average 30 minutes. If you haven’t tweeted before, you’ll be nonplussed that life in 140 characters could be that interesting. But if, like me, you find it provides a brilliant window into snippets of modern life - celebrities, politics, and the common man – then it will come as no surprise.

Stephen Fry getting stuck in a lift is generally recognized to have been Twitter’s big moment, its arrival in the national psyche. From there, it’s gone from strength to strength - when I looked last night, more than 282,000 people were following the man who must still rank as the poster boy for micro-blogging. But even he has some way to go to overtake Barack Obama’s ca 400,000 followers.

Today, a Nielsen Online report says that social networks and blogs (and that includes Twitter) has overtaken e-mail in popularity. What Nielsen calls “member communities” now make up the fourth most popular category online - ahead of e-mail, but still behind search, portals and PC software. 69% of the online audience in the UK are active users of such communities.

These sorts of numbers are attracting a new sort of user – brands like Amazon, the RAC and comparethemarket.com are already appearing on Twitter. But for now, at least, it’s still primarily a medium for the man in the street – even if he’s driving down it in uncool jeans. Now you ask, Jeremy Clarkson’s Twitter page boasts 30,000 followers. Not bad for a man who’s only updated his feed 18 times and appears to have given up on tweeting in early January.