Social networks get more social as spring springs

One part momentum, two parts hype, one part fascination with Rainn Wilson's random thoughts and violent ailurophobia -- stir, and you've got a remarkable 76.8% unique-visitor growth rate for Twitter in March, as noted by a Social Times blogger who had a bit of fun with Compete.com this morning. And the warming trend extends past the trendy microblogging service and its 14 million users.

Facebook's up 23.4% to over 91 million users, and even shaky MySpace, which has seen declines of about 11% over the past year, got a 4% bump to 55.6 million users, and standoffish LinkedIn is up 13.1% to 12.7 million users. And the URL-shortening services crucial to microblogging are showing great gains too; tinyurl.com, is.gd and bit.ly are all up by double digits (21.6%, 21.8% and 48.8% respectively), with wee is.gd showing 3721% growth over the last twelve months. (Rainn Wilson photo courtesy of Stacy D of Flickr, via Wikimedia Commons.)