facebook application development

Compete.com has come out with their April traffic statistics, and it appears that Facebook has experienced its biggest month yet. With over 135 million unique visitors in the U.S., Facebook grew over 2.5 percent last month domestically and overall visits increased a whopping 15.7 percent, signaling that overall usage among users is increasing as well. While May’s statistics will be the ones to refute whether or not Facebook traffic stalled, April appears to have been another big month.

Twitter, the second most buzzed about social platform right now, doesn’t appear to be as large of a threat as it once was. However as many have noted before, unique visitor traffic to Twitter.com is not the best sign of how successful the company is performing. Instead, the absolute volume of tweets coming through the Twitter Platform is what’s most important.

Facebook is nearing 500 million active users, and while the total number of visitors to the site has easily surpassed that threshold, it’s difficult to track what percentage have registered. While all signs point to a June announcement from Facebook for the 500 million user threshold, we’ll have to wait on the company to make any official announcements.

For now, all the metrics we have access to suggest that Facebook is experiencing continued growth and Compete.com supports a similar conclusion.

Facebook has seen immense growth ever since it opened up its gates to the general public in 2006. However, 2009 has been a remarkable year for Facebook by all counts. The social network doubled in size in US in the past year alone, according to stats released by comScore.

Facebook recorded 111.9 million US visitors in December 2009, compared with 54.5 million visitors in December 2008. This propelled the site to become the 4th most visited web property, up from number 11 in 2008. Facebook now accounts for 7% of all time spent online by US visitors.

These stats are impressive enough to make everyone at Facebook and their investors proud of the company. Having a deeper look reveals that Facebook grew substantially across all performance metrics tracked by comScore. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by at least double. Average minutes per usage day grew by 6% and average usage days per visitors saw a gain of 37%. The only metric that saw a decline was the average minutes per visit, which went down by 11%. This tells us that Facebook users are now visiting the site more often and spending less time per visit – as compared to less frequent but longer visits last year.

comScore is not the only web analytics company to report such shiny stats about Facebook, as HitWise and Compete chimed in with their own figures recently. Facebook was the most visited site in the United States on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day”, according to Hitwise. This was the first time in Facebook’s history that it became the most visited site in US, as it one-upped on Google. Earlier this month, Compete released its monthly traffic for December. According to Compete, Facebook’s US visitors jumped to 132 million in December, 2009.

One possible reason for Facebook’s tremendous growth could be the so-called Zuckerberg’s Law – which states that “Next year, facebook users will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” This is because, once a network is in place with active and engaged user base, the dynamics social interactions incentivize participants to share information more regularly, which in turn solicits more engagements from friends and family, thereby creating a vicious circle of user interactions.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, presented the Zuckerberg Law at the Web 2.0 Summit in November 2008. Looking in retrospect, Facebook’s growth has traced the trajectory of his prediction. If the law is to hold in 2010 as well, we would very well see Facebook blast past 220 million user mark by the end of this year. I wont be amused to see this happen, however the one thing that Facebook dearly needs to figure out is a revenue model.

Compete’s latest statistics show that Facebook had a slow summer, growing by only 2 million users between June and the end of September. While summer traffic growth was practically non existent, last month the company posted just under 2 percent growth. This is slightly more negative data than we posted last week which showed Facebook dominating MySpace domestically, growing over 200 percent in the past 12 months.

While Compete also shows Facebook tripling its traffic over the past year, the past few months have been relatively slow. Given that the total number of internet users in the U.S. is approximately 227 million (according to internet world stats), Facebook already has close to 55 percent saturation. Facebook continues to see the standard “S curve” growth in each market it enters and it appears that the company has reached the top of its curve in the U.S.

So what does this mean for the company? Right now I would still wait another month to see if growth has definitely slowed, but given that traffic has been relatively consistent for the past four months, U.S. saturation may actually be leveling off. Facebook continues to grow abroad which should push it closer to 400 million users, however the 1 billion user target that Twitter and Facebook both have, may be a much more distant target.

Also, considering that Compete shows Google reaching 147 million users in the U.S., Facebook probably doesn’t have much room left for domestic growth. This slowing of growth may actually be the one good sign for MySpace which has been getting creamed by Facebook over the past year. Unfortunately for MySpace, Compete shows the company traffic dropping by 10 percent just in the past month.

We’ll have to wait and see if all MySpace users make the shift to Facebook and the much discussed class separation between the social networks.