Twitter Tops MySpace In UK, Spurs Data Center Expansion

Although the maximum length of tweets remains locked at 140 characters, Twitter itself is turning into something of a giant.  This morning, there’s news that the site managed to beat MySpace in terms of UK Internet visits, and it also seems to have caused a data center specialist to find new facilities.

Let’s hit the MySpace-related development first.  In truth, Twitter’s accomplishment here isn’t as impressive as it might sound; Twitter’s conquest is probably due more to MySpace’s fall than its own rise.

Still, Hitwise’s Robin Goad wrote, "Last week Twitter received more UK Internet visits than MySpace for the first time.  As the chart below illustrates, for the week ending 29/08/09 Twitter.com picked up 1 in every 400 UK Internet visits and ranked as the 27th most visited website in the UK, one position above MySpace."

Then there’s the data center issue to consider.  NTT America, which works with Twitter, has set up in a second facility, thereby expanding its footprint by 15,000 square feet.  And Rich Miller recalled that, in June, NTT COO Kazuhiro Gomi said, "[T]raffic generated by Twitter is getting so big, it’s basically eating up a lot of our data center network resources, especially the segment where Twitter is hosted."

Together, these incidents appear to show that Twitter’s growing quickly on both sides of the Atlantic.