Top Social Networking Websites and Forums

By Ian, on December 22nd, 2009

The latest data from Hitwise suggests that the battle between social networks is pretty much a one-horse race. Facebook wins.

Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums – November 2009

Facebook gets four times the traffic of its closest competitor, MySpace. Twitter – so beloved of the media and apparently the word of the year – will need to increase its page views forty times to beat the top contender. It will need an increase of 50% to beat Tagged. And when’s the last time you saw that network mentioned on the BBC (five mentions of Twitter in the last week) or featured in the broadsheet press?

I must admit to being surprised to the extent that the big three networks dominate the area. Like many, my impression was that there was much more of a struggle going on.

Bear in mind, though, that this is US-only data. Bebo is more popular than MySpace in the UK and Ireland, while the Google-owned network Orkut rules the roost in Brazil and much of South Asia. In China, meanwhile, 51.com, Xiaonei and QQ have resisted western decadence with home grown decadence of their own.