There has been a series of increasingly ridiculous comparative Twitter metrics in the last few months. See Twitter More Popular Than The BBC and Twitter Bigger Than Newspapers In UK. C’mon – comparing a social comms tool with content publishers is like comparing dancing with architecture.
But the latest from Hitwise’s resident Twitter watcher Robin Goad merits attention because it compares like with like, two social platforms – Twitter has now overtaken MySpace for share of UK internet visits.
Goad’s chart shows not just the rise in popularity of Twitter.com, which began in October – but also MySpace’s precipitous decline, which has been happening far longer, since those heady days of 2006 when MySpace was social networking. Ultimately, the rise of the 140-character message probably also tells us a lot about our changing attention spans.
Goad now puts Twitter #4 in Hitwise’s social networking category on share of visits, behind Facebook, YouTube and Bebo. For more on the decline of MySpace and Bebo, see our April traffic comparison, and how youngsters are fleeing those two for Facebook.