The battle for friends

Facebook is getting increasingly popular. So popular that last month it recorded almost double the number of global visitors in December than longtime leader MySpace. Facebook doubled the number of visitors in the past year alone - meaning more people had more friends - but really, does this mean that Facebook's easy intimacy is replacing real friendships?

And when people meet up with friends they have on Facebook for a drink, guess what they talk about?

Facebook. While updating Facebook and Twitter pages via the mobile device.

And on that note, Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging and social media site begun by three bloggers in California in 2006, is out-digging the social media site Digg.Twitter is only two years old, and, in essence, very simple: like the status update function in Facebook, it asks the question "What are you doing?", and then gives you a very small space in which to answer. And that's all it does: no faffing about with profiles, photos, poking or sheep.

Twitter increased its popularity tenfold in the UK during the past year - and that’s not including stats around mobile usage.Whereas Digg gets a lot of its visitors from Google (almost 40 percent), Twitter acquires a lot of its users in other social networks like Facebook, through mobile devices. Twitter could go mainstream this year, just as Facebook did about two years ago, led by the 25-34 year old age band as seen here.




Yep, its the interactive world of web 2.0. But as marketing takes a greater hold within social networking we will be entering the world of web 3.0 - driven not just by content or interaction, but with a greater presence of advertising and marketing. In the meantime perhaps some of our relationships may be based solely on exchanges of 140 characters or less - via a gadget that has the name of a fruit.

Blackberry.

Technorati tag:Twitter,Facebook