Twitter Beats Facebook, YouTube and BBC in Social Media Showdown

Twitter has emerged victorious at the T3 awards, beating Facebook and YouTube for Digital Media Service of the Year thanks to its first-class iPhone, Android and iPad apps.

Twitter has had a banner year, since March 2010, the average tweets a day have tripled.

YouTube, Facebook, BBC iPlayer, Skype and Spotify all vied in the category but Twitter's new iPhone, Android and iPad apps have turned the micro-blogging site into social media champions.

Tweeting is an important part of the new media, with information being tweeted far quicker than a news article can be produced. Twitter was behind the exposing of Ryan Giggs as the Premier League player who was sleeping with Imogen Thomas.

Live updates are quick and easy to upload to thousands of people; it has served as an invaluable service to protestors in Libya and Egypt.

T3 commented on Twitter's win: "Twitter has had an incredible year, taken a lot of flak and facilitated a lot of great things - and some terrible ones, granted. At its heart lies, as ever, the purity of truncated expression. Composing a great Tweet is like writing a haiku or sonnet; economy and attention to language and nuance are everything. For keeping you up to date with the lives of others, nothing beats it, but as the Arab Spring proved, it's also a communications tool that dictators genuinely fear."