Nielsen Online has released August data for social networks and news sites, and not surprisingly, the reports give us some excellent insight into which sites are hot, and which are not.

Some of the highlights, from Adam Ostrow at Mashable:

Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.

Facebook unique visitors to the site grew to 38.2 million, representing a more than 10% month-over-month increase and a 100% jump year-over-year.

LinkedIn grew 146% year-over-year to 10.8 million unique visitors.

MySpace saw 61.3 million unique visitors - up slightly from last month, but still essentially flat compared to the same period last year.

Meanwhile, in another Nielsen Online report, the top five news sites, listed here in order of ranking, are MSNBC Digital Network, Yahoo! News, CNN Digital Network, AOL News and NYTimes.com

Not on this list, but one of the biggest gainers, was The Huffington Post, whose monthly unique visitors went up 291% to 5.1 million. It now ranks 28th overall of all news sites.

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