Facebook is in the Global top 10
Alexa now finally lists Facebook in its top 10, after some lag due to their “3-month average” methodology. Facebook is actually 8th now, having leapfrogged biadu, orkut and wikipedia. If I ignore hi5, as I plan to continue to do for a while, myspace is the next site up ahead. That’s the elite company at which FB has arrived with 8 months of explosive, unprecedented growth.
Now we need to find a metric around site utility, which distinguishes the informative content of google or wikipedia, from random profile and photo surfing on a social network. Furthermore, social networks will start to get more sophisticated with their monitization, using their demographic and personal information in unique ways - to seriously match users with purchases or brand identification. Further refining the “value equation” we need to incorporate ajax and flash, which is an increasing part of the facebook (and google and yahoo) experience, optimizing the user experience at a cost to pageviews, in a way myspace would be challenged to imitate.
