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A belated look at a recent report from comScore which shows Twitter is the fastest growing social network on mobile, with growth of 347% since 2009.

The number of users in January 2010 reached 4.7 million – compared to just over 1 million in January 2009, giving a 4.47 multiple increase. Twitter’s 347% growth compares with Facebooks 112% (But Facebook still rules with 25 million mobile users), and Myspace declining 7%.

But to be 1/5th of Facebooks size and growing 3 times as quickly shows Twitter is looking even more promising on mobile than on the fixed internet.

With the caveat that it doesn’t cover third party applications, comScore puts visits to Twitter at 75 million – and regardless of the correlation between those numbers and the actual figures, what you can take away is that the graph is still going up and to the right:

It certainly seems anecdotally as if I’m witnessing more colleagues and friends not only using Twitter, but attempting to use it in a fairly sustainable way rather than registering, looking confused and then vanishing again.

Meanwhile the amount of content being produced has also risen – to a whopping 1.2 billion tweets per month according to data collected by Royal Pingdom.

The methodology used to collect the figures was pretty simple:

‘we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself’

Again, while there could be some debate about the accuracy of the actual figures involved, what’s important is that the overall effect is some consistent and sizeable growth. And that’s in the face of the redesign of Facebook – the next challenger on the list is GoogleBuzz, but so far I’ve found it rather unsatisfactory, even apart from the initial privacy issues.

Although comScore only measures visits to Twitter.com, and more than half of Twitter users use clients and apps, it does provide a clue to Twitter’s growth rates.

In June it gained around 7 million new visitors, hitting 44.5 million unique global visitors, up 19 per cent from May 2009, and now making it the 52nd biggest site in the world (and with a 55 per cent international audience).

Techcrunch points to the Iran election as a contributor to the growth, while Mark Evans over at Twitterati somewhat confusingly uses comScore and Compete figures to calculate a 50-50 U.S and International split.

For the record, the biggest properties measured by comScore are Google sites, Microsoft sites, Yahoo sites, Facebook and Wikimedia Foundation sites.

Want to find Twitter users to follow? There are already a fair number of directories out there, but Followformation offers a slightly different approach.

Whereas Twellow, WeFollow or Just Tweet It display lists for users to explore and manually add followers, you can now select your area of interest, and automatically follow the Top 10 to Top 50 people listed on followformation.

The rankings within each area of interest, e.g. Sports, or Social Media, are all defined by follower counts, so essentially you’re just grabbing the most-followed people who have an interest in their profile.

The only people I can see getting much value from the service are new users, as it’s at least slightly more relevant than the Suggested User List.

I’m a big fan of the TED talks, the conferences which started by covering Technology, Entertainment and Design, and now include a huge range of thought-leaders on a variety of topics. (More about TED here)

Somehow I hadn’t got around to watching the talk by Evan Williams from Twitter until I saw a good article about it by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen.

One interesting point is how Evan has followed a couple of hunches to build projects – Blogger and Twitter.

Secondly – Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium – one message went out to many.

But users invented the @reply functionality, the API, the use of hashtags, and started using it to raise awareness around issues, raise money for causes, implement marketing and business use, etc.

It’s a pretty quick presentation at just 8 minutes – and worth watching until the end to see what happens when TED Curator Chris Anderson uses Twitter search to look for mentions of Evan Williams.

It’s important for us to have an idea of what microblogging tools are most used by our readers. And so:

I’ve just spotted a great new Twitter search tool to find Twitter people by categories (Found via Mashable).

Twellow has already indexed 300,000 Twitter users into various categories (Including me!), with users replicated across all appropriate categories. For example, I’m the 96th most followed person in Marketing, but I also appear in Management, Advertising (hmmmmm?), News, Geeks and Blogging. All the main categories have appropriate sub-categories to find people more easily (Although there does seem to be Marketing as a category, and also a sub-category of Advertising).

And beyond browsing, you can also use specific search terms, including within specified categories.

Until now, your options were to find people within Twitter, hope to find people via keywords, or use Twitterpacks to find anyone that had manually listed themselves. Suddenly finding other people got a whole lot simpler.

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