Holy Tweet! Twitter Use Explodes

By Tom Dunlap

If Twitter seems to be hotter than just about anything else right now, including Facebook, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers COMBINED, that's because it is. Unique visitors to the microblogging phenom skyrocketed in the U.S. in March, according to one tracking site.

ComScore has released its March numbers for the U.S., and it estimates that unique visitors to Twitter.com grew 131 percent between February and March to 9.3 million visitors. Not only did Twitter more than double the number of people that go to its site in a single month, but it accelerated its growth from the 55 percent rate it experienced in February. These numbers do not include international visitors, nor do they include all the usage on desktop and mobile clients, which is significant in Twitter's case.

At the same time, let's be careful out there. A Twitter worm is on the rampage, if you can imagine a worm rampaging. Think Dune, minus Kyle McLaughlin on its back firing an imaginary gun.

The excellent Sean Michael Kerner reported on the worm from our sister site Internetnews.com:

Over the weekend, Twitter became the victim of a cross site scripting attack based worm that spread spam tweets. According to Twitter, nearly 200 accounts were compromised and some 10,000 messages in total were pegged as being worm spam generated.

... In total, there have been four different variants of the worm that hit Twitter over the weekend and now includes Monday. Early Monday Twitter claimed it was successfully fighting the fourth variant.

Worm or no worm, it's a remarkable story. A lot of people still don't get it, but Twitter is invaluable for finding news, commentary, video, etc. It helped greatly in the redesign and relaunch of Semanticweb.com. (Follow me on Twitter here).

Now, if we could slow down on the "Got no sleep last night. Need coffee" tweets, and all the related time-wasters, I'd be a much happy Tweeter. Maybe you could save those pearls of wisdom for your Facebook page? Just a thought.