Facebook will supercede Myspace by June 6, 2008
The Facebook F8 Platform will propel the site ahead of myspace in total pageviews, within a year.
This alexa graph of myspace vs. facebook looks quite innocuous, so my prediction is not self-evident. Myspace has grown above 2.5% of total traffic and claims to be adding 300K new users/day. Facebook just tickling both 1% of traffic and 2% of Reach.
Two factors will enable this:
- The Feed will become so rapidly changing and interesting that we’ll all need to check it more often than email.
- The Profile will really become our online identity.
Currently few FB page views are of the Profile, because it hasn’t been interesting enough. Well, now it will have both the mini-feed rapidly updating - where I can see what this friend Tried to put in my Feed, and unique application boxes, interesting enough for my attention. There is no archive of the Feed .. once you miss it, it is gone, and I think it would be against the TOS to cache it. So you gotta go look at yours now.
The developer application/group crossed 33K members today. Each one can have up to 10 application keys. I’ve created two applications, Lists and Shout, and have 6 other keys in development. That means hundreds of thousands of applications are coming, and the beauty of the viral application adoption model is that the most useful applications get use. Even those useful only to whatever niche they serve. Some of these applications will be backed by serious marketing efforts, by companies to are paying to develop them, and betting heavily on their success.
Mark has pulled thousands of application developers into his fold, and they are rushing to fill a rapidly closing opportunity: to be the first X, Y or Z application on Facebook. I personally have been pushing myself beyond my physical limits (down to 3-5 hrs/day of sleep for 9 days) yet delighting in the chance. Google search is now within the site. I’m be putting wikipedia in, unless happily some person beats me to it. I’m only one of thousands, and that is great for Facebook.
To exceed myspace, FB only needs to double membership, and double pageviews for each member. Since 50% of all members visit daily (a metric myspace will never match), this is extremely achievable in one year.
Since this is my first annual prognostication column (on my daughter’s birthday) I will also add that FB will IPO within 5 months of that date, at a total valuation greater than $10B. Google’s was $21B several years ago, and FB has much greater relative traffic and share than google did at the time.
