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Zuckerberg - Boy billionaire  (Source: Reuters) slips to second

Social networks are huge traffic generators. The big problem for Facebook and other social networks isn't how to get traffic, but how to take the massive amount of traffic they receive and turn those visitors into money for the site and shareholders.

Despite the issues with security and privacy that some users have with Facebook, the site is growing by leaps and bounds. Reuters reports that Facebook has officially beat out as the most visited website on the web. Facebook had 8.9% of all web visitors in the U.S. between January and November 2010 while grabbed 7.2% of all visits. The new stats come from online measurement service Experian Hitwise.

Facebook has been able to grow at an astonishing rate given the short six years that the site has been online. Facebook is the largest social network with roughly half a billion users around the world. During the time when Facebook was young, the largest social network was the now troubled MySpace and Google had the most visits of any site online.

Reuters points out that if you factor Google web properties like YouTube and the Gmail service into the picture, Google is the most visited site with 9.9% of web visits. Facebook would then be in second place with Yahoo and its associated properties in third with 8.1% of visits from U.S. online users.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was also chosen as Time’s Person of the Year for 2010.

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I too don't get Facebook
By Tony Swash on 1/1/2011 11:40:48 AM , Rating: 1
I too don't get Facebook but I kinda understand why others do. This article has an interesting take on why some people don't get Facebook..

RE: I too don't get Facebook
By Solandri on 1/1/2011 3:00:04 PM , Rating: 2
That article is comparing apples to oranges. Email is good for one-to-one communications. It can also be used for broadcast (one-to-many), but other solutions (e.g. a web page, twitter) are better at that. What email sucks at is many-to-many communications. That's what web forums and Facebook walls are good at.

So email and forums occupy opposite ends of the communications spectrum and don't really compete with each other as long as you're using the proper tool for the job. The main threat to email comes from text messaging.

The draw of Facebook is something even most of its users don't realize - the universal ID verification. Say Adam, Betty, and Charlie all want to share their pictures, but only among themselves - they don't want just anyone to view them. So they each make a website which requires you to create a login and password in order to view the pictures they're authorized to view. Adam has to make a username and password on Betty's and Charlie's site. Betty has to make them on Adam's and Charlie's site. Charlie has to make them on Adam's and Betty's site. A bit complex, but not too bad.

Now say they make a 4th friend, Dana. Now each of them has to make yet another username and password, and Dana has to make 3 logins. Now imagine if each person averages 50 friends. That's a lot of logins and passwords. Worse yet, what if Adam accidentally gives his password to a phishing scammer. He now has to visit 50 of his friends' websites and change the password on every single one of them.

What Facebook does is replace all those separate usernames and passwords with a single login. All the other stuff - the walls, the photo sharing, the games, is just fluff to get you to use the single login. It's actually not the best way to do it. Ideally there'd be a third party service which handled only the login and user authentication. That way any website in the world could use it to authenticate its users without having to resort to its own login and password. But obviously that's not in Facebook's best interest as a monopoly, so they're not providing that service. (Which is the reason I refuse to use them.)


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