If media attention is any indication, Twitter has exploded into an all-out phenomenon. Celebrities, politicians, entrepreneurs, business leaders and everyday users are flocking to the service en masse, generating a frenzy of activity and attention.

Everybody is talking about Twitter, but what do the numbers say?

eMarketer estimates there were roughly 6 million Twitter users in the US in 2008, or 3.8% of Internet users.

eMarketer projects that the number of Twitter users will jump to 18.1 million in 2010, representing 10.8% of Internet users.

By all measures, Twitter is growing, and quickly.

comScore reported that Twitter.com drew 4 million unique visitors from home, work and college/university locations in February 2009, up from 340,000 a year earlier—a 1,086% increase.

Nielsen Online reported 7 million unique visitors to Twitter.com during the month, up even higher—1,381%—from 475,000 the prior year.

The Compete figures were higher for the month charted, and according to its latest figures, Twitter had over 14 million unique users in March 2009.

comScore also reported a surge in March. After months of double-digit growth, traffic to Twitter.com accelerated 131% to 9.3 million visitors for the month.

And the number of Twitter users is considerably greater than the number of visitors to Twitter.com, as a result of the multiple access points for the service (for example, mobile devices and desktop apps).

What’s driving this phenomenal growth?

“Twitter lets people know what’s going on about things they care about instantly, as it happens,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO, told The New York Times. “In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.”

A survey of Twitter users from MarketingProfs backs Mr. Williams’ views. On a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for strongly disagree and 5 and for strongly agree), the phrase “I find it exciting to learn new things from people” averaged a score of 4.65 and “I value getting information in a timely manner” averaged 4.58.

“Above all, people on Twitter are truly motivated by learning new things and getting information real-time, as it’s developing,” said Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.
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Source: eMarketer

..and now we are conversing.

Social media is finally taking off in the UK.

eMarketer estimates that 39% of UK Internet users—more than 15.4 million people—will use social networks at least once per month in 2009.

And growth will continue, though at slightly slower rates after 2010. By 2013, the social networking population in the UK will reach 21.9 million and represent 50% of Internet users.

“Most early adopters of social media in the UK were young and male,” says Karin von Abrams, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, UK Social Media: Joining the Conversation. “And while older users—especially those ages 65 and up—still lag in social media usage, the appeal of Facebook and the spread of professional social networking among UK employees are boosting takeup in other age groups.”

The all-important user group, UK women, is also warming to social networking, forums and blogging.

The 2008 “Digital World, Digital Life” survey by TNS provided a detailed snapshot of UK Internet users’ activities online during the year.

“To no one’s surprise, searching, banking and catching up with the news and weather were among the most common online pursuits,” says Ms. von Abrams. “But various forms of social media also attracted significant audiences.”

According to TNS, 37% of UK adult Internet users polled had visited a social networking site in the previous month, while 29% had viewed or contributed to an online forum, and 26% had visited or posted a comment on a message board. Fewer than one in five had visited or added to a wiki (19%) or a blog (16%), or checked into a chat room (13%). Just 10% said they had visited a business networking site.

In its “Communications Market 2008” report, the UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) noted a higher percentage in the number of users engaging in various forms of social media over a three-month period—compared with the one-month period referenced by TNS. Overall, 51% of UK Web users polled said they had been active in social networking or other collaborative activities.

“Many online social activities—such as social networking, blogging and content-sharing—are blurring to some extent, especially as major social networks provide more functionality to integrate these strands of communication,” says Ms. von Abrams. “At the same time, these behaviors are often distinct. They can attract different audiences and are still measured separately by many research firms, so it is useful to look at them one by one.”

Source: eMarketer

Microsoft is launching a new product into private beta on Tuesday morning with the aim of keeping friends and family in touch during emergencies. The idea for product, called Microsoft Vine, came to Microsoft GM Public Safety Initiatives Tammy Savage four and half years ago during Hurricane Katrina. Development started a year and a half ago.

Vine is designed to keep family and friends in touch when other communication methods are either broken or not particularly efficient. Times of crisis usually involve a breakdown in mobile phone or other key communication infrastructures, and Vine is designed to be as hardy as possible to keep people connected. Vine can be accessed via a desktop client (Windows only for now), text message or email.

So what is it? Vine is a tool keep people connected during a crisis, but it’s also used to for more mundane, everyday tasks. My guess is it will hit a sweet spot with the masses. My parents, for example, are going to love this.

It will gather local news (you tell it where you live or are at the moment). News items are gathered from 20,000 local and national news sources, plus public safety announcements from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The tool shows you news items on a local map. You can choose to filter out certain types of news (sports, entertainment, etc.).

Vine also gives you status updates from Facebook for close friends and family. Twitter and other social network news feeds will also be added over time. This lets you see what people are up to, as well as their location on a map if they share it.

Users view and post alerts to some or all friends/family. These can be quick messages to family in the case of emergency, or a church or sports club for meetings or practice. Each person defines how they want to receive alerts - the client, email and/or text message.

Users can also post more lengthy reports which are sent to the dashboards of those you share it with. There are four types of reports at launch: check in safe and well, report upcoming plans, report a situation or general information.

The product is very early and Microsoft is stressing that this is an early beta, designed to get feedback from a small number of users. Eventually the client will have some limited functionality even when offline (which is a likely scenario in a crisis), and new interfaces will be built on other platforms like Mac and Silverlight.

People tend to like stuff like this, and it may eventually turn into the place that you keep your true friends list - the people you absolutely want to be in touch with when things go badly.

More screen shots below:

At its core, Twitter is supposed to be a micro-presence service that invites users to answer the question, “What are you doing?”. That’s all well and good, but most people tend to ignore this question entirely, Tweeting about anecdotes, their favorite songs, and any number of other things totally unrelated to what they’re actually doing. It’s become a service for entertainment, news, and conversations, where those presence statuses (messages like “I’m at work”) have become frowned upon for being dreadfully boring.

They may be boring, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful. Quub, a new service launching tonight, is looking to fill the gap between Twitter’s status updates and the location-based services offered by the likes of Loopt and Google Latitude. The service’s primary purpose is to help users tell their friends what they’re actually doing, and while it shares some similarities with Twitter (including a 140 character limit), there are some key distinctions that help Quub stand on its own.

The first main difference is that all relationships on Quub are two-way. That is, you’ll have to send a friend request (and have it accepted) before you can view someone’s updates. The service also has support for groups, which means you can selectively send out your current status updates to a specific list of people (you can drag and drop users between groups much as you would songs in iTunes).

The other major difference is the way Quub helps you actually write your status updates. Quub knows that most people repeat similar tasks on a day to day basis, and pays attention to your previous status updates to help you build any updates in the future. These suggestions appear as floating text in a bubble beneath the entry field, so while you still have the option of filling in each action manually, you can also click on the suggestions to build your update in a few seconds. This may not matter much on the web client (you’d probably only save a few seconds versus typing the update yourself), but the service is also going to launch a fleet of mobile applications for the iPhone, Android, and other devices, where the suggestions will definitely come in handy. These updates are sent to your Quub friends, and can also be syndicated to a variety of services like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

When it comes to browsing your friends’ status updates, Quub offers a handful of different modes. The first is ‘Present’, which shows the most recent location update from each of your contacts (the resulting list looks similar to foursquare, without the game aspect). A ‘Past’ view offers a Twitter-like stream of all of your friends’ recent updates. And finally, there will be a ‘Future’ view, which allows users to time-stamp updates. The ‘future’ mode is handy because it can also be used as a basic calendar function.

Quub has opted to forgo allowing users to post their exact GPS coordinates (which they deem to be too creepy), and instead leave it up to the user to announce where they are in their message. Unfortunately, Quub has not yet partnered with any databases to help users match their current position to nearby points of interest, so you’ll have to input each location you visit manually at first.

Quub has a solid idea and is well designed, but it’s going to face a few big challenges. For one, many people are already on Twitter, and it may be hard to convince them use another micro-messaging service. Granted, Quub serves a different purpose, with more granular privacy controls and intelligent message suggestions, but it shares so many similarities with Twitter that people may not understand the difference. And unlike foursquare, which has a neat gaming aspect, Quub has nothing to drive you to pull out your phone and update your status frequently. Finally, there’s also the problem that plagues all such location-based services: they’re only useful if your friends are on them, and it’s going to be a long uphill battle to reach critical mass.

Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it’s pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third party sites and services to be built on top of it. For most of its life, Facebook has been almost the exact opposite, insisting that developers work from within its walls to keep much of the data — and the users — there. Tomorrow, it looks like Facebook may be knocking down its dam to let its streams of data flow more freely.

At an event set for 4PM PST tomorrow, Facebook is expected to announce that third-parties will now have access to data from the site that was previously unavailable. The Wall Street Journal has a few of the details, including that developers should be able to access the all-important photos and videos that users upload. Apparently, these third party developers, assuming they get users’ permission to use this data, could build their own sites and services with some of it.

Also of note is that apparently Facebook will begin supporting more technologies that rely on open standards for transporting data. It’s not yet clear exactly what this will mean, but presumably it could help alleviate some of the issues TechCrunch wrote about last week in noting that Facebook, Google, MySpace and others were creating what were essentially proprietary profiles, that forced all of us to actively use and update all of their services.

We’ll keep you posted on the event tomorrow and will reserve further judgement on just how big of an impact this will have until then. If Facebook really is opening most of its data streams, it would seem to me it’s a smart move to stop some of the momentum that smaller rivals, like Twitter, are getting. After all, Facebook still has its big stick — over 250 million users and more importantly, their data — now it may be able to swing it.