Microblogging Web site Twitter has reported a 631 percent increase in UK user numbers in the past year, the Telegraph reported Thursday, leading the newspaper to ask, “is Twitter the new Facebook?”

Ten percent of all Twitter users are based in the United Kingdom, and those users send more than three million “tweets,” or short messages sent via the service, each day.

Twitter allows users to send these messages, limited to 140 characters, for free. They can be sent by users to a network of friends, or by reporters and eye-witnesses on up-to-the-second news stories. Gordon Brown and Barack Obama both use Twitter, which was also used to break news in May about the Chinese earthquake. As Twitter is increasingly used, more high-profile news stories are broken via the service, founded two years ago in San Francisco by Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the Telegraph reported.

To send a tweet, users can send a message through the Twitter Web site, or via a text on their mobile to a specific number.

More people are using Twitter because it is more appealing to more people, thanks to an increasing variety of content, said Robin Goad, research director at Internet analyst firm Hitwise, according to the Telegraph. In the past month, Twitter was accessed by about the same number of men and women, and 37 percent of users were over age 45, he said.

“Another sign of maturity is that mainstream media organisations are starting to pick up traffic from Twitter, such as BBC News,” Goad told the Telegraph.

For a previous article on this topic, visit our partner site, EditorsWeblog.org.