We know Twitter is getting a lot of press these days, but how much? And how much media attention are they getting compared to other hugely popular sites and companies like Facebook, YouTube and Google? Read on to find out.

To help us out, there is a very handy little graph that we can examine in Google Trends called the “news reference volume.” It shows how often a term (for example “Twitter”) shows up in stories on Google News. This means that you can get a pretty good idea of how much press a certain company or website is getting.

A quick look in Google Trends confirms how strong Twitter’s media presence has become in 2009. The first thing you notice is the enormous boost compared to previous years (Twitter launched in 2006). It’s like a race car accelerating.

That in itself is impressive, but it gets even more interesting when you start comparing it with other big Web properties like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and even Google and Yahoo. And just for fun, we threw in Microsoft’s new search contender, Bing, and Microsoft itself.

All the graphs below show the news reference volume over the last 12 months.

(As you can see, all the graphs show a downturn at the very end, which seems to be a side effect of how Google generates its graphs, not an actual downturn.)

Compared with Facebook

Compared with MySpace

Compared with YouTube

Compared with Yahoo

Compared with Bing

Compared with Microsoft

Compared with Google

A few observations

You can read some very interesting information from this data. Here are a some observations based on the graphs above:

• Bing hasn’t received anywhere near the media attention that Twitter has.
• Twitter passed Yahoo sometime in February-March in terms of media attention. Judging by the graph, Twitter is now getting 2-3 times as much press as Yahoo.
• Twitter caught up with Facebook in March, and has has had more press than Facebook since late May.
• Twitter gets more than twice as much press as YouTube, which it passed in February, and 3-4 times as much as MySpace, which it passed around the same time.
• Twitter is even neck and neck with Google, sometimes even passing it. Same thing with Microsoft.

According to a recent report, Twitter is getting the equivalent of $48 million worth of free PR per month, counting the value of mentions in TV, newspapers and magazines. The same survey says that Twitter gets even more media coverage than Google. Not a small feat. It’s something that most companies can only dream of (including us here at Pingdom).

It’s impossible to deny the massive buzz surrounding Twitter, which in turn means that Twitter gets a lot of free press. It has surely been a big factor in Twitter’s rapid growth, and we hope that Twitter manages to take full advantage of all that media attention.

The question now is: Can Twitter keep this up? Can they reach even higher?

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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