I just discovered a bunch of interesting posts on Compete.com analyzing Facebook and MySpace. Compete.com has a proprietary collection of Internet traffic data, so much of their analysis is quite unique. Links and notes of the posts I’ve read:
- 14 million people interacted with Facebook Applications in August
That’s out of 22 million visitors to Facebook. In terms of activity, picture browsing (16M) and profile browsing (21M) have more visitors. The post also shows stats like average time spent per visit. - MySpace vs. Facebook: The Party Starter Showdown
“…in terms of traffic, Facebook is where MySpace was a good two years ago.” The post also had an interesting breakdown of early MySpace and Facebook users.
Very few (1%) of the early MySpace users have “abandoned” it for Facebook. In fact, as a percentage, more early Facebook users have abandoned Facebook for MySpace (6%). This contradicts the general Silicon Valley anecdote that “everyone” is leaving MySpace for Facebook.
Granted, The charts above were made in May, before Facebook opened up their platform. But still, while Facebook has attracted a lot of developers, has those developers developed apps that attract Non-Facebook users to Facebook?
- Top Social Networks: Facebook grows while MySpace slows
This post provided data comparing growth rate between Facebook and MySpace. That Facebook has a higher growth rate is well reported, and honestly, not surprising. After all, they’re in different stages of growth. The interesting info from this post is the plot of Facebook usage by state. It’s surprisingly dense in the east coast.
Having access to interesting data, the way Compete.com has traffic data from ISPs and toolbars, enables a lot of interesting analysis. However, clever joining of public data can also give interesting results, as my correlation of Facebook usage with high school quality shows.
