Twitter Leaves Digg in Rear View Mirror

: Image via CrunchBase

For the first time ever, Twitter has now passed Digg in U.S.-based traffic.

Twitter climbed to the #84 spot in market share last week while Digg landed at #85, according to new data just released by Hitwise. The data analysis company credits the heavy Twitter traffic related to the U.S. Airways crash into the Hudson River for helping bring the site over the edge. Twitter’s success is likely even larger than it appears here, too, as these figures do not take into account Twitter usage originating from cell phones.

Today, traffic to Twitter was even higher with everybody feeling compelled to let everyone else know that, yes, in fact, the U.S. has a new president and that they saw his inauguration speech.

For what it’s worth, Google Trends for Websites also shows Twitter catching up to Digg (but not yet passing). Other measuring services, such as Quantcast, Compete, and comScore, still show a wide gap. For instance, in the U.S. for December, comScore shows Digg.com at 6.8 million unique visitors versus 1.9 million for Twitter.com (see second chart below). That’s a pretty big gap to bridge in less than one month.