Did Google Give Twitter Its Best Traffic Month Ever?

Twitter posted its best month for unique visitors ever, according to analytics from comscore. The credit, tech analysts seem to agree, goes to Google's Live Search feature, which culls tweets in a box on its results page under the first few links.

Earlier this month, Google unveiled its own social media program Buzz, a Gmail add-on which lets users share links and photos with a network of "followers." In other words, it's a Twitter feature -- and possible Twitter Killer! -- right next to your inbox.

Google giveth and Google taketh away, I suppose. But my colleague Dan Indiviglio made an excellent observation just moments ago:



When will Google's Live Search include Buzz items in addition to tweets? The answer is: they already do. The Live Search box collects both tweets and Buzz items, according to the Google blog, and it will be interesting to follow how Live Search continues to drive uniques to both Twitter and Google's Buzz pages.

With Buzz traffic exploding Twitter shouldn't feel safe about relying on Google search pages to drive unique visitors. Twitter's unique visitor count flat-lined for the last quarter of 2009. Some analysts predicted that Twitter's hype had simply run out of juice, and that Buzz could capture some of the market because you don't need a separate application to run it: Buzz lives next to your inbox, after all. I know Buzz's privacy fiasco thew a wet blanket on the product's roll-out, but I still see a bright future for the product.