It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets – MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.
Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period – at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.
There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint.
Via: TechCrunch
This morning, Yahoo announced that it is joining OpenSocial, and along with MySpace and Google, forming the OpenSocial Foundation to “ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.”
Additionally, on the conference call executives indicated that Hi5 will be launching its developer platform with support for OpenSocial applications next Monday, meaning that the initiative will soon allow you to build apps that in theory work on MySpace, Orkut, and hi5 – a fairly significant base of users.
Meanwhile, Facebook announced its own set of standards back in December based on its platform, which, Bebo leveraged to allow developers to port their Facebook apps over to its network. In turn, there are now two standards with huge players behind them, with OpenSocial having the majority of partners, but Facebook having the majority of actual applications that people can use.
Will Facebook ultimately sign on to OpenSocial, or will we be living in a world with two (or more) major social networking platforms for the forseeable future?