Hubspot released its third State of the Twittersphere report this week and found a significant slowing of the growth of Twitter, but that the average Twitter user is more engaged.

Twitter's growth slowed from its peak of 13% in March 2009 to 3.5% in October 2009. That would actually be pretty respectable growth if it weren't for the fact that the platform's international traffic continues to flatten as reported by Comscore, Quantcast.com and Compete.com. Of course, it's smart to factor in the use of tools like TweetDeck which don't require anyone to actually visit the site itself. A better metric might be to look at the total number of tweets posted or perhaps a rolling statistic which addressed how many accounts were updated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

It's not all bad news for the micro-blogging service. Those using the services continue to be engaged with it:

- the average Twitter account has 300 followers. In July the average was 170
- the average account now follows 173 accounts. In July the average was only 47
- the average account today has posted 420 updates. In July that number was 119

This might just be regular growth but participation is yielding some measurable results - including for us. Twitter represents a small but significant source of WebsiteMagazine.com traffic, though so far we have only 6,400 followers.