Facebook growth rising past MySpace

From my local perspective Facebook has been on the rise --- I've noticed that many of my less computer savvy friends have now joined Facebook. I wondered if this trend was global, so I decided to investigate...

During the past few years MySpace has been the dominant social network, however, Facebook has continued to grow much quicker and is expected to become the leading social network. The first plot below (Figure 1) shows a comparison of searches for the keywords "facebook" and "myspace". Lately, for most of 2008, Facebook has been getting a little more attention in the news (lower portion of Figure 1) and has achieved a significantly higher search volume index.

Figure 1. Search Volume Index Comparison of 'facebook' and 'myspace'
(source: Google Trends)

Figure 2 shows the massive popularity of MySpace which began late in 2004, peaked in the middle of 2006, and has since declined --- possibly in part due to the rise of Facebook.

Figure 2. Search Volume Index of 'facebook.com' and 'myspace.com'
(source: Google Trends)

Finally, Figure 3 shows the number of daily unique visitors to Facebook as being more than that of MySpace as far back as November of 2007. (I'm not sure, but I would guess these figures to be based upon Google search result click-thrus)

Figure 3. Daily Unique Visitors of 'facebook' and 'myspace'
(source: Google Trends)

I find it very interesting to see how quickly social networks grow and evolve. As an aside, I think that Facebook is doing things more efficiently and currently providing a better service.