The Social

(Credit: Compete.com)

Unless you have been inhabiting the underground bunker formerly occupied by Dick Cheney, you've probably seen loads of press coverage over a "25 Things About Me" Internet meme that was spreading on Facebook. Basically, members would create a Facebook "note" containing 25 facts about themselves, and then "tag" 25 friends encouraging them to do the same.

Yes, it was a bona fide phenomenon, but I avoided writing about it, because I thought the whole thing was...dumb. Internet memes of that nature have been around since goodness knows when. Breathless press hype over it seemed a tad silly.

But here's something legitimately interesting. Analytics firm Compete.com says that there may actually have been a boost to Facebook traffic as a result of "25 Things," at least in the U.S.: 60 percent more Facebook profiles were created in January than in December. That's not surprising, because Facebook still requires a user account to access all its content--curious newcomers who read about "25 Things" would need to register for accounts in order to explore it.

More noticeably, U.S.-based traffic to Facebook's "notes," normally one of the social network's quieter features, skyrocketed. Four times more visitors than usual hit up the notes feature in January, according to Compete, with 28 percent of Facebook's U.S. users checking them out. (The wildly popular photo-album feature usually draws 60 percent of visitors, for comparison.)

The caveat is that Facebook continues to grow fast and so some of this could be attributed to natural growth rather than "25 Things" momentum. That said, Facebook's U.S. growth has long since started to stabilize--three-quarters of its new users now come from overseas.

Compete has said that its analysts will be posting a blog entry about this later in the week, ideally with some more insight into just how much those annoying "25 Things" lists really did catch on. I've also pinged Facebook to see if they have any internal numbers on the topic.

Here's what'll be interesting to see, at least from my perspective: Will this mean that the newfound popularity of "notes" will last? I post photos, links, and other share-able items to my Facebook profile all the time, but I think I've written a Facebook note a total of once (to alert my friends list that I'd lost all their phone numbers in a personal-electronics mishap). Note-writing always struck me as something that was a little bit too promiscuous for the mainstream Facebook user, the sort of thing that navel-gazing, overshare-prone Twitterers would spring for but which didn't fit in quite as well with the directory-like nature of the social network.

Guess I was wrong. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, after all, likes to say that Facebook has incrementally made the Web's masses more comfortable with sharing more and more information. The success of "25 Things," consequently, must be one of his great triumphs. And now he knows all these useless facts about so many millions of people.

Heaven forbid: Facebook notes could be like a gateway drug to blogging for everyone.

This post was expanded at 9:51 a.m. PT.

Facebook is still growing like wildfire: earlier this week, the social network put out stats that peg its active-user count at 140 million.

Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith compared this to the date that Facebook said it hit 130 million members, and estimated that Facebook must be growing by a whopping 600,000 or 700,000 users per day.

We've checked in with Facebook to see if it has an official comment on that estimation; earlier this year, the company's network was growing by 250,000 users per day.

Statistics firms like Nielsen, ComScore, and Compete.com all have found Facebook's U.S. user count to be between 47 million and 50 million--still smaller than the 60 million-ish U.S. visitors that rival MySpace pulls in. But Facebook's growth is primarily overseas now, and its international pull is responsible for those skyrocketing numbers.

This brings back that persistent blogger pundit question: can Facebook's revenues keep pace with that kind of growth?

Especially overseas, server power can be costly. Facebook has raised a ton of venture capital, is reportedly hunting for more, and says it's in good financial shape. That comes back into question, however, if it's growing faster than it ever expected to.

(Credit: ComScore)

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time. ComScore representatives said that this began in April when Facebook passed MySpace by a hair, and widened in May.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace's 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace's 45.4 billion. It's been a slow but steady upward climb for Facebook, which was founded by then-Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site was restricted to members with e-mail addresses from a handful of elite universities before gradually expanding to the general public and becoming a genuine Silicon Valley sensation when it kick-started the developer platform craze last year.

It was a very different story for MySpace, which was founded in 2003 and achieved mass-market success in a relatively short time by gearing itself toward independent bands and their fans.

MySpace, owned by News Corp. since 2005, nevertheless remains far ahead of Facebook in the U.S., where both companies are based. The same ComScore numbers found that MySpace has 73.7 million unique visitors in the U.S. versus Facebook's 35.6 million, and that neither site grew much in the past month. Other number-crunching firms show similar results: a Compete.com graph of the two, for example, shows MySpace's U.S. traffic shrinking a bit while Facebook's is growing steadily, but not astronomically.

This appears to confirm the common wisdom that Facebook's present growth is largely overseas. And that, of course, assumes that the numbers are accurate--online metrics firms, ComScore included, have been subject to plenty of scrutiny on behalf of Web companies and ad firms. Additionally, some of MySpace's overseas traffic does not come from the MySpace.com domain; its Chinese-language site, for example, is MySpace.cn. (ComScore representatives said later that its assessment of MySpace's traffic encompassed all the site's domains.)

In January, Facebook unveiled plans to provide translated versions of the site, something that MySpace has done since 2006 after first launching separate versions of the site for other English-speaking countries like the U.K. and Australia. There are now 29 localized versions of MySpace, and the company has office space in 20 different countries. MySpace representatives have explained in the past that their aim is to build communities centered on regional culture, not to simply expand the same networking tool worldwide.

But the Facebook strategy appears to be working, too. Numbers released by ComScore earlier this week about Facebook's growth in France suggest that the translated sites are having some positive effects in building international audiences. On Thursday, Chinese and Russian versions of the site debuted, bringing the translation offering to around 20 languages.

Overseas challenges
Still, even a fast-growing site like Facebook faces issues abroad. Ad dollars--typically stronger in the U.S. than overseas--still aren't rolling in on social networks the way many expected them to, and last month Facebook took out a $100 million loan to keep pace with growth. MySpace, meanwhile, just rolled out a site redesign that aims to make it more appealing to both users and advertisers.

Then there's the fact that while MySpace might be Facebook's chief rival in the U.S., there are plenty of other social networks with big followings in different pockets of the globe that pose local competition. Orkut, run by Google, has a lock on Brazil and also eats up a big portion of the market in India. Hi5 is big in Latin America. Friendster, long past popularity in the U.S., has nevertheless gained a sizeable following in several Asian countries.

And Facebook continues to work on image issues. The independently run company, its valuation pegged at a jaw-dropping $15 billion after an investment from Microsoft, has also been boosting its executive team to lift its reputation from Palo Alto start-up to legitimate international corporation. This spring, the company courted Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, to join its roster in a similar capacity as a policy-focused PR czar.

This post was updated at 1:04 PM with comment from ComScore.