• April 18, 2008

Social networking sites appear to be breaking out of their winter downturn. After a two-month slide in traffic, Facebook bounced back by increasing to 35.5 million unique U.S. visitors in March from 32.4 million in February, according to comScore.

Social networking rival and category leader MySpace also saw a traffic spike to 72.7 million after languishing around 68.5 million for the last three months. Even old school social site Classmates.com got a bump to 14 million visitors in March--up from 13 million the previous month, and 10 million in December.

Blog networks also posted strong gains. Blogger climbed to 42.3 million from about 39 million, and Six Apart jumped to 13.7 million from 9.7 million. Bebo, acquired by AOL for $850 million in March, on the other hand, remained basically flat, increasing by only about 100,000 to 4.9 million.

--Mark Walsh