Is Facebook vulnerable to takeover?

If you believe the latest news stories doing the rounds, Facebook's growing niche in the social networking market is down to class. Although it was arch rival MySpace that was anointed as the future of social networking, positioning that saw it swallowed by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in a big money deal, it's suddenly Facebook that's the site, it seems, of choice.

At least it is for the more grown up, the more mature and - hell, why not? - even the snobbish social networker. If you are fed up with being bombarded with adverts for bands they'll never see, and with requests from so-called friends whose names were no more familiar to them than the inner workings of a big rocket, these people moved over to Facebook, where - as things stand - friends lists are seemingly more selective. As more than one person has observed, MySpace is for pretend friends, Facebook is for real friends.

The numbers don't lie. MySpace has the higher user count, and according to a Hitwise analyst, in April of this year, nearly 80 per cent of all social networking site visits were to MySpace, which subsequently provided a quarter of the traffic for the rest of its competition through referral links. Facebook trailed a long way behind in second place, capturing just 11 per cent of social networking traffic. That's a substantial lead by anyone's standards.

Yet suddenly the momentum has shifted to Facebook. So quickly moving is this particular sector of the web that the proverbial pendulum is almost swinging in freefall, and a site that was being written off by many earlier in the year is now seemingly the online place to be. Bluntly, the impetus is with Facebook, while MySpace is looking dominant, but vulnerable and tired.

Humble beginnings

Facebook didn't start out as a competitor to MySpace and its ilk in any real sense. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerman along with a handful of his friends, it was originally a social networking site firmly limited to academia, Harvard University at first. If you didn't have a US college email address, you couldn't get in.

But so successful was the site in the US academic system that it began to migrate from its original Harvard roots across to other schools, colleges and higher education facilities. By the end of its first year, it had its first million users, and they just kept coming.

And so it continued, expanding across academic sites across the world, until registrations were finally opened up to all in September last year. It wasn't a popular decision with its core users, who to this day are probably instrumental in forging the class divide perceptions.

Facebook pressed ahead anyway, and user numbers have subsequently erupted. Over 25 million are now registered with the service, and that number is growing. With MySpace sitting around the 60 million mark, the gap is closing quickly: it's estimated that Facebook's user numbers are growing at a rate of three to one over MySpace's.

Up For Sale

Facebook, though, has arrived at what is potentially a big turning point for the service. The rumour mill has, as is the case with any successful dot com business, been quick to offer up stories of potential buyers for the business, and it's hardly surprising.

Email to a friend

Print this page