WebProNews

Twitter's potential Achilles' heel - or head to toe bull's-eye, really - has long been the amount of time it spends in a nonfunctional state.  One new set of stats seems to indicate that it's solving the problem, though, and another shows that it's continuing to grow, regardless.

We'll start with the reliability issue.  Pingdom reports that Twitter's downtime has been diminishing over the past few months, reaching about 11.5 hours in June and a little over four in July.  The really promising thing: Twitter's homepage was only inaccessible for one hour and three minutes during August.

Assuming this trend isn't a fluke, the company will have answered its users' main complaint.  Admittedly, the big challenge of monetization still looms, but this next bit of data should in some way help address that.

Hitwise's Sandra Hanchard writes, "Visits to Twitter by Australian Internet users increased by 518.2% year-on-year, comparing weeks ending 1 September 2007 and 30 August 2008."  A nice chart proves the point.

Popularity at home, international success, a solid tech setup - the pieces to something seem to be falling into place.  Assuming spam or some other thing doesn't get in the way, Twitter looks to have some staying power.