Twitter Headquarters, San Francisco, United States

Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable").
Rankings
Twitter is ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis. Daily user estimates vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382%, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio with 240% increase, and Facebook with 228% increase. However, only 40% of Twitter's users are retained.