Maybe it’s Jimmy Fallon's integration of it into his new TV show, Shaq’s use of it to interact in real-life with fans, or blog’s ability to write about it non-stop, but one way or another, Twitter’s growth just continues to explode.

The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in one month as well, as in January, Twitter.com clocked in with 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month.

Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to widen its lead on MySpace, with a total of 65.7 million unique visitors versus 54.1 million for its increasingly distant competitor. Meanwhile, the recently re-launched Bebo, which now plays in the social networking aggregation game, is showing some promise, growing 40 percent from last year to register a total of nearly 3.2 million US visitors in February.

The competition that most are now focused on, however, is that between Facebook and Twitter. While Facebook remains several orders of magnitude bigger, its recent move to a real-time homepage and its overhaul of Facebook Pages is seen by many as a move to thwart Twitter’s continued growth. It will be a few months until this shows up in the numbers and gives us some sort of indication as to whether or not that strategy is working, but for now, both networking sites are enjoying tremendous growth. The full report is embedded below:







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