Twitter : niche or mainstream ?

Hitwise has published a post on their blog about the US internet visits to twitter.com. The good news is that traffic is increasing. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month. These figures look impressive, but still according to Hitwise, Twitter is ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites.



Twitter is especially very successful because of the openness of the APIs. Rumours are that there is more traffic to the APIs than traffic to the twitter.com website. This kind of traffic is probably never measured by companies such as Hitwise, Alexa, Compete or Quantcast (see this previous post for several traffic graphs for Twitter).

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise finishes her post with Whilst Twitter continues to be a niche website, it also continues to enjoy strong growth. At the same time Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb writes in a post titled Early Stats Show Twitter Taking Off in Japan : The signs are that Japanese Twitter usage is set to explode in popularity. .... Could Japan be the first country where Twitter usage becomes mainstream, rather than just being popular among geeks - as it is in the US and english speaking countries? Judging by these early stats, that's a good bet!

Is Twitter still a niche or is it becoming mainstream ? We'll have to wait a little bit to figure this out.