Twitter is now the UK’s fastest growing website, but growth is stuttering worldwide.

Twitter has officially become the fastest growing website according to HitWise. The micro-blogging juggernaut has broken into the top 40 most visited sites in Britain, placed at number 38, whereas last year it secured 969th.

Robin Goad, Hitwise research director, says:

“The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it has occurred during 2009. Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher, have come rolling in.”

However, as we reported yesterday;

“During May this year 55.9% of UK traffic from Twitter went to content-driven online media sites whereas only 9.5% of traffic went to retail. This difference is in stark contrast to traffic from Google UK, which was much more evenly distributed among different types of site.”

Growth Stuttering

Twitter’s monumental growth has officially slowed down…According to compete, monthly unique visitors to Twitter rose a mere 1.47 percent, or 285,333, to 19.7 million between April and May. The number of visits increased just shy of 7 percent. That compares with an increase of monthly visitors of 5.4 million during March and 6.1 million in February.

Also, a recent study that looked deeply into over 300,000 accounts, found that 90% of the tweets created on Twitter, are being created by only 10% of the accounts. Additionally, half of Twitter users had only posted once in the last 74 days.

Whilst Twitter is sure to remain with us for time to come, its Facebook who’s recent changes have seen the site maintain and improve upon its dominance. The site has now been the number one social networking site for seven months in a row, through May, with 144.3 million unique visitors around the globe. It has been number one in the U.S. for five straight months, with 75.4 million unique visitors in May, up 190 percent from last year, according to Nielsen Online.

If there’s any site that has the cheek and ability to steal Twitter’s monstrous success, its Facebook.