Facebook, with Microsoft currently poised to buy a minority stake, now has more unique users than its NewsCorp-owned rival, MySpace. Facebook received 6.5 million unique visitors in August 2007 compared to MySpace's 6.4 million - both are now visited by one in every five Britons online.
However, Facebook has lost the title of fastest growing site to Perfspot.com. The site, that allows users to create their favourite web content and sites such as news and weather, has grown by 756 per cent in just four months. Facebook grew by 541 per cent over the eight months from December 2006 to August 2007.
“The suspicion that the next big thing in social networking could always be just round the corner is illustrated by PerfSpot. It wasn’t even on the social network radar until April of this year but in the last four months its visitor numbers have grown at a greater rate than Facebook has across the last eight months.
“Some, however, have theorised the future of social networking will revolve around specific interest-groups as opposed to the general behemoths that dominate today. The fact that a number of the fastest-growing networks concern specific interest areas, such as business (LinkedIn), travel (WAYN) or music (Imeem), seems to add credibility to this theory,” said Alexander Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.
In terms of social network engagement, Britons spent the most time on Facebook most total (991 million minutes) followed by Bebo (600 million minutes) and MySpace (540 million minutes). Virtual world Second life is the leading social network in terms of monthly time per visitor (5 hours 29 minutes) followed by teen community Habbo (3 hrs 6 mins) and Tagged.com (2 hrs 40 mins).
The social networking boom shows no signs of slowing - almost half (48 per cent) of Britons online (15.3 million people) visited at least one of the ten most popular social networks in August 2007.
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