You had to see this coming, what with @Oprah (Winfrey) discovering it and Ashton "@aplusk" Kutcher challenging CNN to a duel over who'd reach a million followers first, but Twitter had explosive growth in March. It more than doubled U.S. visitors alone to 9.3 million (19 million worldwide, Techcrunch says), making Twitter the fastest-growing site last month, according to Comscore.

Numbers that impressive mean the site is more than just the net's latest craze — it means the service has become an inescapable cultural phenomenon, for better or worse.

But what's even more compelling about those March statistics? They don't include all sorts of interaction with the micro-blogging site, like the number of people who use Twitter on mobile phones or via third-party applications that send and receive Tweets.

Put another way, even if there was no twitter.com, there could be a Twitter. After getting an account there is no really reason to go back to the site unless you want to change something in your profile. Even Twitter search is at a different domain — search.twitter.com — a situation the company is working quickly to rectify, the better to make pages relevant to users and thus advertiser-friendly.

Still, according to Alexa.com, twitter.com, which launched in March 2006, is ranked 65th in net traffic overall.

Of course Twitter's real impact is almost impossible to gauge other than anecdotally as it quickly permeates the mainstream, and people come up with inventive ways to use it as something more than a status update soapbox, suggestion box and complaint center.

Forget the anointing power of Oprah — and the massive influx of traffic she drives. We've long passed the moment when numbers alone tell us nearly enough.

Cooks are publishing recipes 140 characters at a time, and ferries telegraph their comings and goings, and scientists use it to send telepathic messages, and guilt-ridden souls confess anonymously, and audiophiles turn it into a music discovery engine, and politicians are announcing their candidacies and even tweeting from the House floor.

At that point, the number of unique visitors a month doesn't tell you much. You need a cultural/technology anthropological futurist to divine its meaning. And hopefully one who can explain things in 140-character bites.

How long can it be before "Tweet" becomes the next official verb in some dictionary? Hey — it took "Google" only about three years, so they'd be right on schedule.

Image: Status screengrab of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (@biz) on election night, 2008)

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