Last month the four-year-old micro-blogging service surpassed MySpace in unique visitors to become the No. 3 social networking-type service in the world, according to new data from comScore Inc. Twitter had nearly 96 million unique visitors in August, up 76 percent from the same period last year, comScore said. MySpace, meanwhile, dropped 17 percent during the same period, to 95 million unique visitors last month.

Twitter is expected to gain visitors from a redesign of Twitter.com launched two weeks ago, which made the site more like Facebook’s and could draw in users who access Twitter through third-party applications such as TweetDeck. The seven-year-old MySpace, meanwhile, is trying to cast itself as the place to try out new music and entertainment, and a platform for musicians to interact with fans. It also is working on overhauling its home page.

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The popularity of Twitter has fueled expectations that marketers could use the service to target relevant ads to consumers interested in real-time information about breaking events and other topics. Since launching its much-anticipated advertising products in April, Twitter has signed on more than 30 big-name brands, including Coca-Cola Co. (KO), Virgin America and Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), to test them.

Some marketers say that early results are promising but that advertising on Twitter remains an experiment. Other marketers, including PepsiCo Inc.’s (PEP) beverage brands and Best Buy Co. (BBY), who tested out Twitter’s new advertising products—some without cost—haven’t made new ad buys. Marketers say they definitely aren’t ruling out advertising on Twitter in the future, but that it’s still early days and they are figuring out what works.

“The jury is out” on whether Twitter can become a home for brand advertisers, said David Cohen, an executive vice president at Universal McCann, a media-buying agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.

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The micro-blogging service disclosed in a notice to developers late Tuesday that an unidentified person had been creating so-called “torrent” sites and forums for “a number of years” with the sole purpose of getting users to input user names and passwords the person could use to gain access to Twitter accounts.

The person “waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up,” the notice stated.

Torrent sites are those that allow users to search for files sent through file-sharing service BitTorrent. Twitter didn’t identify any specific sites and forums it believes to be gathering the data.

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Two of the founders of Twitter Inc., Evan Williams and Biz Stone, talked about how the micro-blogging service began, the challenges it faced and an eventual potential IPO, at Startup School, an event organized by Y Combinator held at the University of California-Berkeley on Saturday.

In 2006, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone had an assignment at podcasting start-up Odeo, along with everyone else at the company, to build something new over two weeks.

Dorsey drew up a simple sketch of a text-entry box with the word “Status” above it and the domain name, my.stat.us.

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This web- and Twitter-savvy move (he uses the word “retweet”!) is the most immediate piece of a digital campaign strategy that also includes a YouTube channel, a Facebook presence, a Flickr account and a Digg profile, all lined up in the footer of every page on his Web site. Visitors are also urged to sign up for an email newsletter.

Campaign 2.0 was ushered into existence by Barack Obama’s brilliant campaign manager, David Plouffe, who really set the gold standard, even though Twitter wasn’t a part of his strategy. The microblogging powerhouse wasn’t at quite the same level of omnipresence a year and a half ago as it is today.

One of Twitter’s most persistent qualities is its malleability, lending it to any number of creative applications users can invent and implement. Of course, Twitter is the tool, not the strategy–next election cycle, there will no doubt be a new shiny new app to play with. But for now, It will be interesting to see if Newsom’s camp does something creative with this one.