One-time Twitter rival Plurk is back in the headlines this week, thanks to a million-dollar investment from WI Harper Group.

The Canadian startup, seeing the majority of its traffic from Asia and deciding to cede North America to Twitter for the time being, has been restructured and re-headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan.

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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.

Unique visitors to Twitter.com fell for the third successive month, dropping 2.43% overall, to 22,481,568, according to Compete.com. More concerning for the network was a -7.24% dip in overall visits.

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Overall, traffic to all social media fell, with Facebook losing -0.47% to 128,339,156 unique visitors for November, but gaining 3.51% to 2,601,399,595 visitors overall.

Friendfeed fell sharply, down 20.95% to just 552,147 uniques, and has now lost almost half of its unique visitors since peaking at 1,044,326 in August. Overall visitors fell 26.62%.

LinkedIn, which has been the social media star the past five or six months, fell for the first time since May, losing 6.93% of unique visitors, and 11.53% overall.

MySpace dipped -2.64%, and -3.08% overall.

Plurk, which was once considered a rival to Twitter, saw just over two hundred thousand unique visitors for the month, and surely will not last much into 2010.

After showing only marginal growth in May, Twitter resumed its impressive upward run with a 16.57 per cent gain in unique visits for June to 22,997,148, and over 150 million visits overall (up 12.05 per cent).

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Facebook was also solid, rising 8.45 per cent to 122,559,672 uniques, and +9.02 per cent in overall visits, which are now closing in on two billion. Indeed, Facebook’s growth rate is staggering – it’s rapidly gaining ground on Google.

Once-rival MySpace also grew, up 7.19 per cent to 60,973,908 uniques.

Friendfeed lost a little ground in uniques (-0.26 per cent), but dropped 20.26 per cent in overall visits.

Plurk lost 11.48 per cent of uniques and 12.68 per cent of overall visitors.

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It couldn’t last forever. According to website traffic tracker Compete.com, unique visitors to Twitter.com rose less than 1.5 per cent, from 19,443,286 to 19,728,619.

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Facebook, meanwhile, gained over 8.5 per cent, boasting 113,014,638 visits in May, and further widened the gap over once-rival MySpace, which also saw minimal growth.

Indeed, Facebook was the only social networking platform that gained any considerable ground. Friendfeed was up marginally, Plurk dipped a little, and Linkedin dropped over 3 per cent.

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