Hitwise: Why Facebook Is On Top

During the first week of September, Facebook captured nearly 58% of visits in the social networking custom category, according to new data from research firm Hitwise. MySpace -- which was the top dog in social networking as recently as May -- now trails Facebook significantly with a mere 31% share of the market.

Visits to the broader category of 155 social networking Web sites increased 53% during the first week of September year-over-year.

During the past 5 weeks, visits to the category reached the highest levels of the past three years. The previous peak occurred during the week ending June 23, 2007 when visits to MySpace reached their highest point.

Hitwise attributes a number of factors to the rapid rise of Facebook, such as a cleaner layout and mobile applications on the iPhone and BlackBerry mobile phone.

Another is certainly the Facebook Connect program, which allows users to share stories in their news feed and make comments on Web sites and blogs, according to Hitwise. The program launched in beta during July of last year, then officially launched to developers in early December.

The number of Web sites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 Web sites globally including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, and The Huffington Post.

What is really interesting, according to Hitwise, is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook because there is a clear uptick in the growth rate following the launch of Facebook Connect.

A clear benefit of Facebook Connect is the ability of the user to use a single portable identity -- and most importantly, one password, rather than logging into multiple accounts across the network of Web sites.

Facebook's recent purchase of FriendFeed is also expected to help to aggregate this single portable identity across the Internet.

Participation from Web sites in Facebook Connect also has strong implications to appear more often in the search results executed on Facebook resulting from member postings as search becomes a more prevalent activity within this large audience.

1 comment about "Hitwise: Why Facebook Is On Top ".
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  1. Brian Kissel, September 10, 2009 at 7:05 a.m.

    For anyone wanting to accept OpenID for registration and login from Google, AOL, Yahoo, MySpace, and many others on your website, please check out the OpenID Foundation website at http://openid.net/add-openid/

    For those who would like to also accept Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Twitter, and Windows LiveID for regsitration and login, please check out http://rpxnow.com

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