Social media landscape 'is changing for Twitter'

Twitter is now more popular than MySpace in the social networking site rankings, according to figures released by Hitwise.

The social media service Twitter is gaining in popularity, but it may be even more popular than statistics suggest, reported an industry analyst.

Twitter was more popular than MySpace in figures for the last week in August, but this does not tell the whole story, according to Robin Goad on his Analyst Weblog on Hitwise.

Mr Goad, who has worked for the Corporate Executive Board and Datamonitor, suggested that many people actually use the social media through third-party applications such as Tweetdeck or through their mobile phones.

"If anything, Twitter is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website," he explained.

Mr Goad was commenting on figures released by Hitwise which show that Twitter was the 27th most popular website in the UK for the last week of August, while MySpace was 28th.

MySpace is now 5th in the rankings for social networking sites, behind Facebook, YouTube, Bebo and Twitter.

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