With over 175 million active users worldwide, Facebook has far outgrown its social-networking competitor MySpace. In fact, US market research company comScore found that the site is attracting twice as many visitors as the once hugely popular MySpace.
ComScore found that in January 2009, while MySpace was visited by 124 million unique visitors, Facebook had a 276 million unique visitor count. This translates to a 2pc decline in traffic for MySpace, but a 16.6pc increase in traffic for Facebook.
Although Facebook has been rapidly gaining popularity as the social-networking site of choice since its launch in 2004, recent Twitter-like changes caused near-revolt for users, a million of whom complained that the new layout was too transparent with user updates, while hiding relevant information that was previously easy to access.
Ironically, while attracting much criticism, the redesigned layout has led to a large increase in quiz-taking and pushed the viral nature of LivingSocial and its ‘Pick Your Five’ feature for sharing favourite movies, books and hobbies among friends and other users. This is one area that the rapidly growing Twitter user base cannot compete with.
However, while Facebook endures the explosion in popularity of Twitter, it can also rest easy knowing that stats from just over one year ago put it on par with MySpace in terms of numbers of users – a number it has not just overtaken, but now doubled in size.
By Marie Boran
