UK traffic to Twitter has increased tenfold in the past year, according to new figures from Hitwise.
The statistics show that while the microblogging service was the 2,953rd most visited UK website a year ago, it is now the 291st most popular site.
It is likely that the site attracts even more hits as a result of a number of users accessing it via mobile devices and third-party applications, according to Robin Goad, research director at Hitwise.
Equivalent figures from Hitwise's US arm show that Twitter overtook Digg in terms of American web traffic last week.
"Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than ten minutes a year ago to half an hour now," Goad says.
He adds that Twitter is becoming an increasingly important source of traffic for news, entertainment and social networking sites, while Twitter itself is now the 23rd most popular social media site in the UK.
While Twitter has traditionally been most popular with young web users living in urban areas, its fastest growing audience segment is now the 35 to 44-year-old age group.
