• August 25, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is no longer the most popular figure on Facebook. Olympic mega-winner Michael Phelps has passed Obama in the number of "fans" or "supporters" associated with their respective pages on the site.

As of Sunday evening, Obama had 1,386,640 "supporters" while Phelps had more than 1,414,000 "fans."

Phelps' rise on Facebook was helped along by a congratulatory message many users saw when they logged into the site after the Baltimore swimmer captured 8 gold medals during the Beijing Games. The message contained a link to his Facebook page, where users could sign up as fans.

Though Obama now lags behind Phelps in Facebook fans, he is still far ahead of Republican rival Sen. John McCain. McCain currently has about 215,919 fans.--Tanya Irwin