Figures recently released by Compete.com show massive site growth for Plurk, one of a new crop of micro-blogging platforms to have emerged in recent months.

According to the latest Compete.com figures, Plurk has experienced 4561 percent site growth over the month May to June, which makes it the fourth fastest growing site for the month.

Compete.com track the online behaviour of over 2,000,000 internet users to  draw together their data. The Compete.com Complete Ranked Lists tool provides lists of the most popular sites across the Internet and can be used by marketers to:

• get an idea of where their online presence sits in relation to their peers in the marketplace, and
• gain an understanding of braoder trends in overall internet usage.

Of the top five fastest growing sites, Plurk is the only one that is
not an annual event or a special event. Annual sports events, such as
Wimbledon and the US Open are likely to see significant peaks in
traffic around the times that they are running. Plurk appears to have
benefited from the massive downtime of the incumbent market leader Twitter over the same period.

Twitter has become the dominant micro-blogging platform in recent years. Micro-blogging is:

a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates
(usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by
anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These
messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text
messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web. (Wikipedia link – opens in new window).

More recently, Twitter has become infamous for its long periods of
down time, and has come under more and more criticism as a result of
its apparent inability to cope with traffic volumes. In fact, theres
been so much down time that the cartoon whale that graces the page that
displays when Twitter is down has become somewhat of an internet celebrity in its own right. If you want to find out more about the FailWhale, check out the link below and the photo at the end of this story