The presidential election is a good deal for Twitter, according to the latest numbers from Nielsen Online, reported by CNET’s Webware blog. Twitter is currently the fastest growing social-networking site, according to the numbers, with a massive growth of 343% when looking back to September last year. Several other social-networking sites show similar growth, especially Tagged.com with 330% (at #2), and Ning at 251% (#3) in particular. read more

No surprise here, but the recent debate means more Twitter activity. Twitter reports that they had a 160% tweet increase compared to the same time the previous week, and that the daily update was up 18.5%. More stats in the Twitter blog post. The same also tells us that they’re polishing the Election page we’ve mentioned previously.

Wired’s Epicenter blog gets to wrap this up:

Predictions for Thursday’s VP debate? Sarah Palin tweets crash the site in record time.