Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook’s staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg’s growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook’s.

As you can see from the graphs, Digg and Facebook had very similar growth curves for the first four years of their existence, and according to Compete’s historical data, Digg’s traffic was actually greater than Facebook’s for 33 out of 51 months.

It needs to be said, though, that Facebook’s user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg’s traffic “only” grew by about 50 percent, according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook’s traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.

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Twitter is falling prey to a major security flaw right now. The service is getting swamped with messages that say: “Don’t Click” and a URL. Apparently, this hack has been around for over two weeks, but it only really took off today. If you actually click on the link while you are logged into Twitter, another “Don’t Click” message will be posted to your Twitter account, which then propagates the cycle.

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MapQuest was once the unquestioned leader among online mapping services. And while others like Google (GOOG) Maps or Microsoft’s (MSFT) Live Search Maps offer a more modern interface and far more features than MapQuest, the latest data from Hitwise show that MapQuest still commands almost 40 percent of the market. Even on the fast-moving Internet, old habits clearly only die very slowly.

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Today, Google’s Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can’t access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.

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