Big Week for Twitter

Twitter is getting big.  And not just by the typical steady web standards they were already meeting in the last few months.  There was a jump that can really only best be described as an "explosion" in the last few weeks (and the usu ally staid ComScore doesn't often use such dramatic terms.  The jump to 14 million is significant enough, but as ComScore pointed out, we're also not talking about a numbers increase, but a notable demographic shift that includes a striking increase in those 25-55 years of age.  More stunning?  The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is now persons 45-54... this, after Facebook continued to show that women 55+ were their fastest growing demo.

What's the other telltale sign Twitter is getting big?  Our largest rash of Fail Whales in months.  Twitter fell over so many times this week many people just took a break.

Surprisingly, the traffic story wasn't the only big Twitter story this week.  Last week we had speculation that Google was going to snatch up Twitter, and today we have the more likely scenario that Microsoft and Google may be sparring for Twitter's attention.

And Thursday brought the fiber/phone outage in Silicon Valley and parts of the Bay Area yesterday, where AT&T used Twitter to communicate with customers (and those watching the story unfold).

On a side note, it was interesting to see as I was researching my next speech that the number of hospitals on Twitter surpassed 130 recently.  (A further aside, it's interesting that a hospital is able to keep a Twitter account going but so few (only 23) have blogs- but I suspect that number is simply reported on this site much lower than it really is.)

-Dean