If you’ve been reading other technology blogs recently you would see that there is a lot of buzz surrounding the growth of Facebook in relation to MySpace. Yesterday Marshall Kirkpatrick suggested that Myspace is still crushing Facebook and Erick Schonfeld gave a swift rebuttal. The debate stems over analytics data about Myspace and Facebook traffic.
Erick Schonfeld highlighted that Facebook is gaining ground against Myspace on a global level and has even surpassed Myspace in the time spent on the site. Ultimately, MySpace traffic has been relatively stagnant over the past year and Facebook has gained significant ground. Marshall Kirkpatrick makes a great point though: the press is heavily biased in favor of Facebook over Myspace. Is this a result of classism? It very well may be but no matter how you look at it, Facebook is dwarfing Myspace in regards to growth.
One interesting chart that I found is included in the four charts depicted below. According to Alexa (which is famously inaccurate), Facebook growth has appeared to slow significantly over the past two months. Much of the other data being used in the debates only cover through December and in one instance November. This forces me to question whether or not Facebook’s growth may start facing resistance in their ability to double in size every six months.
The Alexa chart would suggest that they have already begun to see resistance. December and January can be horribly slow though so the data may be misleading. Do you think Facebook will continue their wild growth and surge past Myspace in total size or will their growth begin to slow?
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
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As an app developer, I've seen the Facebook over the last two months as well. It's still growing, but at a noticeably slower rate.
Comment by Zuckerborg — January 17, 2008 @ 8:23 am
but you also have to take into account — how long has Facebook been running? so how many more years does MySpace have on Facebook?and also note how many more pr0n and spam accounts are on MySpace. so many of the "users" counted in the MySpace collection are not actually users at all.
Comment by James Parker — January 17, 2008 @ 9:17 am
As an app developer, I've seen the Facebook over the last two months as well. It's still growing, but at a noticeably slower rate.
Comment by Zuckerborg — January 17, 2008 @ 9:23 am
but you also have to take into account — how long has Facebook been running? so how many more years does MySpace have on Facebook?
and also note how many more pr0n and spam accounts are on MySpace. so many of the "users" counted in the MySpace collection are not actually users at all.
Comment by James Parker — January 17, 2008 @ 10:17 am
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