Twitter has made headlines for some amazingly powerful stuff lately; breaking the news of recent China’s earthquake; partnering with MySpace for it’s “data availability” project; even helping a student get out of jail! All of these speak to the growing popularity of Twitter, and also help to explain it’s recent scaling issues. But how big is twitter, who uses it and how?

Growth a tween would be proud of.

In the past few months, Twitter has grown rapidly. In terms of U.S. visitors, Compete has seen Twitter traffic nearly double from February to April, currently attracting nearly 1.2 million people per month. Looking at Twitter’s Attention share helps to further illustrate how fast the service has grown.

The chart above shows Twitter’s share of daily attention for the past 180 days, and reveals some interesting patterns.

• In terms of time spent on site as a share of all time spent online, Twitter has grown dramatically - more than quadrupling over the period.
• Twitter is a weekday event – While its difficult to tell in the chart above, the valleys in the chart below coincide with the weekend, while the peaks represent weekdays. On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day.
• The weekday skewed tweet activity makes sense in the context of Lee Odden’s Twitter usage poll - which highlighted twitter users affinity for networking and sharing content through twitter.

Its fun to hang with the Y.M.T.A

Who are these 1.2 million visitors, and how intensely do they use the site? We segmented visitors by intensity of use, gender and age for the month of April to get a better idea. Generally, users skew young, male, and addicted to twitter.

The data above shows that nearly one quarter of all twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (6+ visits/month), and another 25% are light users (2-5 visits/month). It should be noted that the somewhat lenient definition of a “heavy” user was a result of the many ways user can connect to Twitter.

The gender and age breakdowns indicate that users skew young and male. These two charts are indexed to the U.S internet average, where “100” is the average.

• Twitter users are 10% more likely to be male than the average internet user. This skew is nearly identical across all three Usage groups.
• Twitter skews heavily towards the college/twenty-something crowd. Twitter attracts 18-24 year-olds at nearly twice the rate of an average U.S website.
• Splitting age demographics based on usage intensity shows that heavy users tend to skew older than visitors who only hit the site once a month. This could indicate that while the younger segments are more exploratory, the 25-44 year old segments have found more value in Twitter and started to ramp up usage.

Twitter may be growing like crazy but it’s yet to go mainstream. Interestingly, Twitter’s strategy of letting developers re-purpose its data may help the service reach the tipping point by making Twitter’s value more accessible. Check back next week to see how these twitter based sites (like twitterlocal and summize) are building a loyal base.

If any industry has felt the brunt of the internet as a disruptive technology, it’s the music industry, which has been dealt a heavy blow by the onset of digital music distribution. On the April 28, the RIAA again confirmed this state of affairs when reporting that CD sales, the mainstay of the business for the last 15 years, were down a whopping 20.5% in 2007. Then on May 2, a Federal Court ordered AOL, Real Networks and Yahoo! to pay $100M to music artists as back payment for streaming their music online, proving that it’s not just the Big Four labels who have been affected by this disruptive shift.

Apple, a technology company, has become the most powerful player, with sales of 2 billion songs last year. The iPod/iTunes combo, the default of cool in our culture, has freaked out the Big Four and sent traditional music retailers like Wal-Mart and web 1.0 giants like Amazon scrambling into digital music distribution. So far their nascent incursions have not had a big impact, despite offering DRM-free music and savings of a few pennies.

While Apple and other legal download options have somewhat offset declining CD sales, the industry carries far too much overhead from 60 years of jacked up prices to make the digital transition smoothly. Music buyers used to pay up to $18 for an album and rarely was every song a keeper, now they pay 99 cents a drink.

Moreover, many consumers don’t pay for music at any price. The chart below, based on Compete’s data on more than 1,000 music sites, shows how the most popular options for listening to music online are free.

Despite lawsuits against illegal download sites, the fastest growing category in online music last year was P2P downloads, which shot up 140%. Nearly ten years after Napster raged through college networks, online music piracy continues to grow.

Meanwhile, the largest category in online music in March, 2008 was streaming, which racked up 28M unique visitors. The portals have driven the category’s dominance for many years by plugging into their massive traffic bases. MySpace joined the top ranks in 2005.

Then in 2007, a new breed of Web 2.0 sites with sleek, bright graphics and deep search and social feature integration, began to spread virally through social networks and heavily-linked music blogs. The sites combine streaming music with community-based sharing (vs. the anonymous exchange at P2P download sites) and in doing so can skirt thorny legal download issues.

These social streaming communities have risen rapidly in popularity. iMeem recently overtook Yahoo! Music as the most popular streaming site on the web.

*The Hypem1500 presents aggregate traffic to the more than 1500 music blogs tracked by the Hype Machine, a popular blog aggregator. The Hype Machine itself is ranked separately from its network at #16.

Collectively, the social streaming communities are flattening out the curve of online music. Compared to a year ago, the distribution of unique visitors at the Top 25 Streaming sites has a more gradual drop-off and longer tail.

As the music industry seeks to reassemble in the wake of digital distribution, it should recognize social streaming communities as the fastest growing opportunity in its evolution.

**UPDATE** Since the original post, we received great feedback from MySpace who provided the urls of music streaming beyond music.myspace.com, and we wanted to share those numbers. After we ran Compete data on the expanded set of urls, we found that its aggregate volume for music-streaming unique visitors is 19.2 million.

The data from the post included only the subdomain traffic of some sites, and does not represent all of their on-site streaming activity. This relates to some of the larger brands like MySpace, AOL, and Yahoo! who have more urls beyond the subdomains listed where consumers can stream music.

We encourage discussion on our blog and additional perspectives on the evolving online music space.

I was playing around with the fancy new chat feature in Facebook a couple nights ago, and started talking to my college buddy from a few years back. Soon I was chatting with my boyfriend’s mom, and eventually started talking to my 11 year-old cousin. I started to realize just how clear it’s become that Facebook is no longer just for college kids. In fact, social networking is beginning to spread to the population regardless of age. As detailed in the recent Compete webinar on Segment-Driven Marketing, 92% of marketing professionals say their company uses segmentation to manage their online advertising and /or search marketing. Judging by the amount of ads for hip, cool prepaid phones, trendy clothing and “hot shoes,” I’d say companies see Facebook and other social networking sites as the perfect place to target that “young adult” audience. With people of every demographic beginning to use these sites, is this really a smart way to spend their ad budgets?

I made use of Compete’s Behavior Match product to find out. I know from discussions with our clients that wireless carriers specifically are very interested in the young adult segment, so I thought I’d do some analysis on the young adults we’ve seen shopping carrier sites. I created a segment of “Young Adult Wireless Prospects”, defined as anyone from 18-34 who were seen visiting a wireless carrier site (but not seen as acting like a customer of that site), and looked at which sites they over-index on as compared to the internet population as a whole.

*Read as: Young Adult Wireless Prospects are 1.5x more likely to visit Facebook than the average internet user.

While Young Adult Wireless Prospects do over-index on Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube it is not by a staggering amount, as on average Young Adult Wireless Prospects only visit the big social networking sites 1.4 times as often as the general internet population. One can’t deny that getting your message and name out to the millions of people visiting these sites is an impressive thing (though expensive), but in terms of segment-based marketing strategies, I think the wireless companies may be missing the mark.

There is another category of sites Young Adult Wireless Prospects over-index on; Computer and Website Personalization sites appear high and often on the Behavior Match indexing report. Specifically, Young Adult Wireless Prospects over-index on sites designed to help you make your MySpace page or Facebook profile “cooler.”

Personalization sites for the social networking sites generally have a higher concentration of the Young Adult Wireless Prospect crowd than the social networking sites themselves (and are also all ad-supported). But would these consumers be susceptible to marketing messages? Are they engaged on these sites?

This chart is looking at the number of visits each domain sees on a monthly basis. Visits are a good way to measure if a site is seeing enough repeat visitors to make advertising on the site effective. We can see that Freeweblayouts.net and Freepagegraphics.com see a lot of repeat visitors, with around 4 million and 3 million visits a month, respectively. Imikimi.com isn’t far behind with about 1.5 million visits and the rest are tight around the 500,000 mark. It appears as though these sites are more than just a one-stop shop for their users.

So what does all this mean? Major websites will always be a good place to advertise, but when it comes to behaviorally segmenting Young Adult Wireless Prospects, there could be a more efficient way to go about it. Within the category of Computer and Website Personalization sites alone, there are a few sites that receive over a million users a month and on which Young Adult Wireless Prospects are 3.5X more likely to visit than the internet population in general. Messaging on these sites could be a perfect way to efficiently target a key segment in the wireless industry, while still getting the message out to millions of people.

We all know this person: constantly showing up in your Facebook news feed with status updates, added friends and wall comments. The “stickiness” of most social sites is unrivaled by any other type of site, a point that the behavior of hardcore members really drive home. These “Social Addicts” check their beloved site constantly and have helped encourage similar behavior from other users.

Knowing how different Facebook and MySpace are in terms of design, functionality and usage, how much do “addicts” of these social networks differ? You may have read some of our posts on BehaviorMatch before, but this analysis essentially highlights the online behavior that is specific to a particular group of users. This analysis is designed to help with media buying, but in the case of social networks it can also help define the psychographic makeup of the group, and how “addicts” generally use their favorite social site.

The table below shows the sites that MySpace and Facebook Addicts* visited substantially more than the average internet user. So what do these users do when they aren’t getting their social network fix?

• To be fair, the MySpace list is filtered. An untouched list of the top twenty most popular websites among MySpace addicts would consist entirely of sites focused on modifying personal profile pages.
• After scrubbing out a majority of the sites focused on MySpace layouts, it seems that the hardcore users of this MySpace are still primarily teens, as sites focused on proms (meprom.com), shoes (kicksaholic.com), and Alternative music (warpedtour.com) bubble to the top of the list.
• It’s no surprise that hardcore Facebook users have a high affinity to some sites supporting Facebook applications, but the applications they interact with the most is telling of their online interests. It appears gaming (socialgn.com), dating (sexappealhq.com), music (garageband.com), and interacting with friends (quizapps.com) are all a core online activity to Facebook addicts.

MySpace and Facebook are two well established sites with massive audiences. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much smaller, growing site devoted to communication. In some ways it could be seen as the direction the social web is heading…and it’s also highly addicting. So what do the sites that Twitter addicts visit say about the future of the web, and how does this compare to the two more traditional social web players?

Comparing the three, some really compelling trends are visible. While it’s not shocking that sites like twhirl.org (a site that offers “tweet” enabling software) rise to the top of the list, some of the others show that these users are most interested in socializing.

• MySpace addicts are somewhat vain – focusing heavily on establishing and fine tuning their online personas by customization of their personal profiles
• Facebook addicts focus more on engagement – interacting with applications, music and people both on and off the platform
• Twitter addicts are most interested in fostering communication and exploration – sites that allow a user to understand what their contacts are doing, provide a platform for content discovery and encourage users to actively participate are the most likely places to find hardcore twitterers.

* In this analysis Facebook and MySpace addicts were defined as any user who logged into either site at least 21 days in February. Twitter addicts were defined as anyone who went to their twitter home page at least 10 times in a month. The less stringent qualifications for Twitter addicts was necessary because of the multiple channels used to access the site (mobile, desktop applications).

Earlier this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg made Forbes list of the World’s Richest Men. Facebook certainly had more ups than downs in 2007, but can the site continue its rapid growth into 2008? Where’s MySpace and what else is going in the social web? It appears that the real movers in and shakers in 2008 weren’t moving much in early 2007.

For the big players in the space, February represented a slight decrease in traffic, but the year- over-year growth rates seem to indicate that social networking (as an industry) has yet to peak. The table below shows the top social networks in February 2008, ranked by monthly visits. This ranking factors in both total audience size, and also intensity of use.

UPDATED - 3/13

• Myspace was down slightly from February 2007 in terms of total US visits. However, the networking giant still holds a commanding traffic lead over all other Social sites.
• Facebook visits fell slightly from January 2008 to February 2008, but over the year the site has grown by over 75%. In terms of US visitors, it is now about one half the size of Myspace, but receives about 1/3rd as many visits.
• Niche markets are still attractive in terms of Social networking: Cafemom (a social network geared towards mothers), Linkedin (a networking site for professionals) and Fubar (“the first online bar”) all grew by 5X or more from February 2007 through February 2008. Fubar, in fact, exploded into the top 20 networks from relative obscurity one year ago.
• Innovative business models also had success in 2007: Communication platform Twitter, and white label social network Ning, both found a dramatically larger audience in the past year.

While fairly flat trend lines in MySpace traffic may provide an indication of the market reaching its peak, the rapid growth of some very new players in the space speaks to the opportunities in social networking that still exist… but only time will tell if Zuckerburg makes Forbe’s list next year.

Update: At the request of several of our readers, we’ve updated the table to include several prominent social networks that were left off the original post:

• imeem.com
• livejournal.com
• 360.yahoo.com

• 15.4 million Facebook users interacted with fb Application pages (@ apps.facebook.com) in January:

  

• On average ~51% of Facebook’s user base engages with Application pages:

  

• In January, fb Application pages directly contributed 1.5 billion pages (8.4% of total) to Facebook.com’s total page view count. Given the trend, I expect Application pages to gradually form a larger chunk of Facebook.com’s overall page views over time.

  Note: Stats in this post are limited to activity on apps.facebook.com. Most Facebook Applications load pages in iframes from 3rd party (non-facebook) servers. According to sources, users can generate well over >10 page views on 3rd party servers for each one that they see on apps.facebook.com. In January, Compete estimates ~1.5 billion page loads of apps.facebook.com, which translates to roughly 11-12 billion page views across Facebook app iframes.

  

• 6-month gains in time spent, sessions, and page views generated on apps.facebook.com:

  

Bottom-line:
This data reinforces the fact that Facebook’s Application strategy and ongoing refinements appear to be working. Now the big question — as Facebook’s unique visitor growth plateaus, what will be their next traffic growth engine? They are still 36 million short of MySpace.com’s 67 million U.S. unique visitors.