What do people search for on Twitter? We collected search terms that we took place within Twitter’s search engine to identify the topics that are being searched most often on Twitter for the week ending March 21, 2009. Searches for the vampire series ‘twilight’ were the most popular for the week overall fueled by the US release of the DVD, followed by ‘redco’, and ‘parkersburg’.

Last week we provided the BBC with some interesting data illustrating how UK Internet visits to Social Networks and Forums have overtaken Adult websites. As the chart below illustrates, social networks overtook last October and have remained ahead since.

Arlington, Va. - The web site of Arlington-based PBS outdrew all commercial broadcast network sites in 2008, according to new figures from Internet measurement service Hitwise. PBS.org received a larger percentage share of U.S. visits more often than any network site, ranking No. 1 among those sites for 19 weeks.

London - While Facebook was the second most-visited website in the U.K. in September, behind Google, growth appears to be slowing for the company and other social networks in the U.K., according to a report from measurement and analysis firm Hitwise.

Arlington, Va. - PBS.org, the website of PBS, saw a 25% jump in site visits during the 2007-08 television season, compared with the prior year, according to new statistics released by Internet measurement service Hitwise. The site, in fact, finished third among the six commercial broadcast network web sites, drawing 18.9% of U.S. visits to trail only ABC and NBC. It led all six in visits for the weeks ending May 31, June 7, 14 and 21.

The Brit Awards take place tomorrow evening and there are three awards up for the public vote: best British Breakthrough Act, best British Live Act, and best British Single. The latter is tricky to analyze using search data, but I thought I’d have a look at the first two. The chart below illustrates weekly UK Internet searches for the five acts nominated for British Breakthrough Act in the weeks since the nominations were announced.

Yahoo! Search attracts a younger audience than Google. I promised a post with figures to back up my claim (sorry I am a day late - forgot it was Valentine's Day!). The following charts show the percentage of visits from each age group to Yahoo! Search and Google.com.

We’ve just completed our latest hot gadget list and, given the amount of coverage they have received, I wasn’t surprised to see that the Nintendo Wii is currently the most searched for console in the UK, nor that the iPhone now accounts for one third of all searches for a specific mobile phone. However, one gadget that has crept up slowly without a huge amount of fanfare is the digital photo frame – those small LCD photo frames that show digital photos either via a USB connection or memory card slot. In fact, they are now so popular that last week searches for them overtook searches for cameras – digital or otherwise.

Guitar Hero 3 launched 28th October and has since garnered $115 million for Activision whose chairman today revealed that Activision has shipped more of the Guitar Hero 3 game than any other in its history. In short order Guitar Hero 3 became the most searched for video game based on share of US Internet searches.

I've seen several posts circulating in the blogosphere postulating on the demise of Facebook given a drop in the sites traffic over August and September of this year. My immediate reaction was to turn to Hitwise data and provide a little more granularity to provide insight to the question of Facebook slowdown v. seasonality (my hypothesis on the recent drop in traffic).

Despite innovations in online maps, UK consumer demand for online maps has not grown in the past year. As reported in my Site Seeing column in today's Guardian, Multimap remains the #1 Maps website, based on share of UK visits, with most of its traffic coming from store locator services. Google Maps is #2, having overtaken Streetmap.co.uk and The AA’s Travelwatch in March.

Google Checkout recently launched in the UK and I wanted to share some statistics about the take up so far in the US where Google Checkout has been available for just less than a year and in the UK where it has just launched.