Digg might be seeing a nice burst of new traffic thanks to Facebook’s recent Timeline and Open Graph initiatives. In a post titled “How Facebook Changed our Mobile Traffic“, Digg’s team discussed how mobile traffic to the site has risen since it launched its Timeline app in December.

Depending on which source you trust Digg’s traffic has been extremely flat, if not dropping, over the past year, which included a few leadership changes such as its founder Kevin Rose leaving the company entirely.

Armed with a source of new traffic, mobile visitors from Facebook, the company is aiming to make some changes to its mobile site and iOS app due to the stats it found below:

- Unique visitors to m.digg.com are up 29 percent
- Mobile accounts for about 35 percent of our traffic from Digg Social Reader
- Of the people coming from Facebook to Digg, 27 percent are on a mobile device

What types of changes will the company make? Here are some of the things it plans to launch within the next week:

Knowing this, we’ve made a few changes to our mobile experience rolling out later this week. Firstly, if you’re currently using our Digg iOS app, we’ll ask if you want to upgrade to add reads, comments and Diggs to your Facebook Timeline, allowing you to easily sync your Digg activity between your desktop and IOS device.

Secondly, if you’re reading Digg.com on a mobile device, you can now use the new Mobile Newsbar, which is built especially for the mobile touch devices. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Newsbar allows you to click through a number of related headlines quickly and directly from the browser; which we think is a better way to read content on-the-go.

Thanks to Facebook, Digg might be getting a bit of a second chance thanks to getting the front and center treatment on people’s profiles by way of Timeline. While a few months worth of data isn’t enough to show that Digg is out of the woods completely, the team seems to be pretty excited about the results thus far.

The old-school geek in me wants to see Digg be successful, if only for the fact that many consider it to be the site that kicked off the Web 2.0 craze many moons ago. This might be the kick it needs.

But hey, the Internet just killed Encylopedias so maybe it is time to move directly into the future.

What would traffic look like if cars drove themselves? Here’s a visualization below that looks a bit like the old video game Frogger. Even though it’s completely fake, the idea of traffic moving this way scares the crap out of me:

According to Experian Hitwise, the Pinterest train keeps rolling and with 21% growth in traffic in Feburary this year, the site has broken into the top 30 for pageviews in the U.S.:

Pintererst total US page views increased 21% in Feb-12 & ranks among the top-30 US sites overall in terms of total page views

— Experian Hitwise (@Hitwise_US) March 12, 2012

Last month we told you about how Pinterest’s growth may have been breaking records on the web, following a hockey-stick-like growth curve to glory.

According to Experian, Pinterest also had 103M visitors from January 12th to February 12th, an increase of 36% during that time period:

Pinterest traffic increased 36% in Feb-12 vs Jan-12, the site received more than 103M total US visits

— Experian Hitwise (@Hitwise_US) March 12, 2012

The Internet is discussing why and how Pinterest is growing so fast and the answer appears to be good old massive engagement. That means that the people who use the site to “pin” things to share with others use it a lot.

The Next Web has even found Pinterest to be a great way to share content like people’s iPhone home screens and books that our staff suggests to readers.

The uses for Pinterest are infinite and play into the built-in nature that we all have to curate, collect, and share. Content creators and businesses love it too, since traffic originating from things pinned on Pinterest send a ridiculous amount of traffic to sites, some say even more than Twitter does.

Join us on Pinterest for cool and techie things to see and share

While traffic stats can be a tricky thing, one thing they’re good for is to judge growth trends. According to a new report by web traffic analyst Compete, Google+ saw impressive growth towards the end of 2011.

Google’s social network, which has come under fire since its heavy integration in Google’s main product, search, saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter did in December of 2011.

Compete says that Twitter had 40,411,065 unique visitors during that month, and Google+ had an impressive 20M during the same time-frame.

After seeing a slight dip in visitors in October of last year, it looks like Google+ righted the ship and had a strong end of the year, which is good news for Google since it’s clearly putting all of its social eggs into the Google+ basket.

The below chart shows the traffic statistics for Google+ since Compete started tracking them, which was as soon as the site became public:

In addition to Google+ becoming more popular as a social destination, Compete shares that its +1 feature which is embedded on a variety of blogs and other external sites saw a rise in popularity as well. To grab those numbers, Compete tracked the subdomain for the +1 button, which is http://plusone.google.com, and saw over 40M uniques in December 2011 (the feature was only widely released in November):

While we should all take these numbers with a grain of salt, its clear that Google+ grabbed a solid userbase and continues to trend upwards in popularity when it comes to monthly unique visitors. While the site is nowhere near the traffic that Facebook sees on a daily basis, the company will definitely continue to push the product forward and we’ll be watching.

Fab.com is hot, hot, hot. The daily deals site has seen some amazing growth in the past four months alone, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down at all.

Today, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg shared some interesting stats and trends on his personal blog about the company.

Most notably, Fab saw its direct traffic pass traffic from email for the first time since ever last month. That means that the company has serious brand reputation which could be driving some wild word of mouth advertising.

In his post, Goldberg shared a graph showing the jump:

His insights on why this is?

We believe that the rise in direct traffic is because of 3 reasons:
- Mobile visits now account for nearly 1/3 of all visits.
- More and more people are just typing in www.fab.com into their browser at 11am ET / 8am PT each day instead of waiting to click on our emails.
- With 2 million members now, growing by 450,000 in January 2012 alone, we’ve reached a bit of a tipping point in general awareness of Fab.

The fact that its email traffic has dominated so much is a testament to how much its members love the service. That much traffic just from email campaigns is impressive.

Speaking of hot services, Goldberg also pointed out that Pinterest has now passed Twitter in referral traffic to the site, a pretty impressive feat for a service that’s still in its infancy as well.

On Feburary 7th, 2011, the entire Gawker Media style changed from a typical one you’d see on a blog to a hipper more programmed feel. The design focused on a top story and then listed out others along the side in a static bar.

Some people called it horrific, some used the word “satanic“. Well all of those negative words about Gawker’s redesign can probably be put to rest.

According to a few tweets from Gawker head honcho Nick Denton today, the network saw a lift of over 10 million monthly unique visitors from this point last year:

Yep, January’s in. 35.6m people globally: tinyurl.com/janglobal Interesting: no lift from trade shows. yfrog.com/mmg26xp

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

It seems like the redesign didn’t scare people away after all, as you can tell by the graph that Denton includes with this tweet. With 35.6m unique visitors in January, the network just saw its best traffic ever.

So just when you think something is so radical and can’t work simply because it’s different, remember Gawker’s redesign. It actually worked.