We’re still spending tons of time on social network sites
The most recent numbers from Nielsen show that we are spending more time social networking than ever. As of May, Facebook was still number one. And Twitter continues to grow - though it is showing some signs of slowing down.
How about some numbers?
- Facebook had 144.3 million unique visitors in May, making it the world’s top social network for the seventh month in a row.
- Former top site Myspace.com was the top social network when ranked by total video streams, with 116.1 million.
- Upstart Twitter was the fastest growing site in May, increasing a mind-boggling 1,448 percent year-over-year.
Of course, it’s easy to post huge percentage gains when you start from a relatively small number. The site had 18.2 million unique visitors last month (slightly more than 10 percent of Facebook’s total). During the same month a year ago, Twitter had 1.2 million visitors.
It’ll be interesting to see if Twitter can keep up this rate of growth. ReadWriteWeb points out that Twitter’s month-to-month growth seems to be slowing down.
It is important to note, though, that Twitter’s growth has slowed down dramatically over the last two months, as both the time per person spent on the site and Twitter’s month-over-month growth only increased slightly since April 2009.
Tim has covered a wide range of topics, including tourism, crime, aviation and gambling, since becoming a reporter in 1990. The Oklahoma native joined the Post-Dispatch in 2007 after spending nine years in Orlando. In his spare time, he's often exploring one virtual world or another. He can be reached at tbarker@post-dispatch.com. 
There is an art to tweeting, and not all people have the brevity of wit to take advantage of it. At one point, Twitter allowed branding in tweets with URLs or URIs being left as typed if you were under the 140. When Twitter started tinyurling all weblinks it limited its usefulness as a marketing/branding tool. It does not surprise me that Twitter is slowing down. When for a while, Facebook tried to go Twitter-length-compliant with all Wall posts, the masses rose up and got it changed to a more reasonable length.