A week ago I reported how game seven of NBA Finals had set a new tweet per second (TPS) record on Twitter of 3,085.

This beat the previous high which was Japan scoring against Cameroon in the World Cup on June 14. I proposed that, flat and largely uninteresting as the World Cup was at that stage of the competition, that it might not be until we were out of the group stages that the World Cup resumed the top spot.

I was almost right. Yesterday, the final whistle of Japan’s 3-1 victory over Denmark set a new benchmark of 3,283 TPS.

All of this tells us a couple of things. One, that the World Cup is big in Japan. And two: so is Twitter.

(Source: Twitter blog.)

So reports the official Twitter blog.

It’s interesting because it’s beaten out the most tweet-intensive World Cup moment thus far, which was Japan scoring against Cameroon on June 14.

Sure, it was game seven of the NBA Finals, but it will be interesting to see if and when it’s eclipsed by the any match or goal in the World Cup. Given how flat it’s been thus far, my guess is we probably won’t see a new mark set until we’re out of the group stages.

In May 2009, @Mashable, @TechCrunch and @BoingBoing were about equal as three of the biggest blogs on the planet. Each had about 1.85-1.90 million unique visitors in that month.

Fast-forward just a year later, and everything has changed. BoingBoing has dropped almost a million visitors, TechCrunch has gone nowhere, and Mashable has gained a million.

Why? Twitter.

@Mashable has over two million followers. Twitter started to really take off early in 2009, and Mashable totally capitalised. Twitter has easily become their primary focus point – they write a ton of Twitter content, and share heavily on the network. (As a comparison, Mashable has ‘just’ 207 thousand fans on Facebook – a tenth of the network size.)

@TechCrunch has a little under 1.4 million followers, but they don’t push anywhere near as hard as Mashable does on Twitter. That said, it’s enough to keep them in the game. (54,210 Facebook fans.)

@BoingBoing has just 43,219 followers. And doesn’t push hard at all. Indeed, BoingBoing isn’t even on Facebook. Which suggests to me that they either don’t really get the value of social media, or don’t think that they need it. For example – they don’t even use a retweet button on their blog.

After all, let’s face it – BoingBoing and Mashable aren’t all that different. Both are heavy recyclers of external content (although Mashable does write a lot more original material – TechCrunch is almost all original material and opinion). The main difference is Mashable is very much more attuned to the modern social media audience, both in content and presentation. Indeed, they made dramatic, intentional adjustments to capitalise on that audience shift.

BoingBoing did nothing. And until they realise that, and want to change, their numbers are probably only going to get worse. They’re still thinking old-school – Digg, Reddit, Delicious and Stumbleupon. And while you can still get some traffic spikes from those sources, it’s very much on the wane, and doesn’t begin to compare to the Terminator-like, never-ending, cannot-be-stopped onslaught of Twitter.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know this is Compete, and yes, I know that this mostly represents US traffic. But unless you can prove to me that the relationship between these numbers is dramatically different around the world – and can show me where you get those numbers – it’s largely a moot point.)

This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

New visitors to Twitter.com rose by just +1.07% for the month of April for a total of 21,514,898, with overall visits to the site falling by an eyebrow-raising -18.11% (147,418,997).

* Month-on-month, overall visits to the site are down some 33 million. We might have to take this with a pinch – Compete, who seem to be getting slower-and-slower to release data each and every month, had overall visits to Twitter for March at 161,903,421 the last time I wrote this report, and they’ve now changed this number to 180 million. If the former is correct, it’s still a pretty big drop, although nowhere near as serious.

However, Twitter.com has clearly reached a ceiling that requires something special to break through – possibly the extra functionality that @al3x hinted at before he moved on to pastures new.

Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a ‘topping-out’ process that could see more users – new and established – moving away from the Twitter home page towards desktop and mobile clients in greater numbers? The sharp decline in visits this month would indicate that this is already happening for veterans.

One wonders how many of these old-hands the iPhone – and possibly the official Twitter for iPhone app – have picked up and converted.

Meanwhile, Facebook added 2.53% of new visitors (135,375,036 visits) and +15.70% overall (3,165,316,934), which obviously contrasts sharply with Twitter.

We’ll have to look at next month’s data to see the full picture for Facebook, but at the moment it would appear that not only are people not leaving the network over privacy concerns – they’re actually more eager to sign up.

Following @theonion’s still record 485,000 cull last month, ESPN (@espn) becomes the latest high-profile Twitter account to essentially start over and unfollow almost everybody in their network.

From 102,467 on May 12 to just 54 at the time of writing – a drop of 102,413 in about 48 hours. That’s a reduction of 99.94 per cent. It’s also a very smart move, as Twitter simply doesn’t work if you follow tens of thousands of people back.

And with the new Business Center toolkit on the horizon, there’s absolutely no need for brands to clutter up their screens with everybody and their uncle just because they might want to send over a direct message. My money’s on @wholefoods next.