Facebook ousts Google in US popularity

Facebook has become the most visited website in the United States as millions of people turn to the social networking site to play online games.

The social networking site has seen phenomenal growth around the world and for the first time surpassed Google.com for a whole week in the US last week, according to the web analytics firm Hitwise.

The milestone indicates how important a gateway to the web social networks, in particular Facebook, are becoming.

Facebook has more than 400 million regular users worldwide, about half of whom visit the site every day to check their updates, post photos and, increasingly, play online social games.

The growing popularity of simple games such as FarmVille, which has more than 83 million players worldwide, has breathed added life into social networks and hold out the prospect of huge profits for Facebook and companies such as Zynga and Playfish as gamers use real money to buy virtual goods inside the games.

Google reacted to the threat of Facebook by launching its own social network within its Gmail service last month. But Google Buzz has got to a rocky start as users complained about privacy concerns.

Google’s earlier attempt in 2004 at a social network called Orkut has only ever been really popular in Brazil.

Hitwise said that the market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185 per cent last week as compared with the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9 per cent during the same timeframe.

Facebook’s home page saw 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google’s 7.03 per cent. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14 per cent of all US Internet visits last week, Hitwise said.

Facebook.com has been the most visited US website before: it reached the No 1 spot on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as on the weekend of March 6 and 7. But last week is the most sustained lead it has attained.

In the UK, Facebook still lags some distance behind Google, partly because Google’s market share of internet search is so much greater. Google.co.uk had 9.34 per cent of visits while Facebook had 6.01 per cent.

The Hitwise figures do not include searches carried out in a box in a browser toolbar and do not cover visits to other Google websites for services such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps.

Taking all these Google properties into account, the internet search company is still way out in front, accounting for 11.03 per cent of US website visits last week with Yahoo! properties second.

The US accounts for only 30 per cent of Facebook’s global users. The company is continuing its policy of expansion overseas and is opening its first office in India to help it to tap the increasing popularity of social networking in the country

The office will be located in the southern city of Hyderabad and work along similar lines to other operation centres in the United States and Ireland, with online advertising and support teams

Facebook’s director of global online operations, Don Faul, wrote on the firm’s blog: “In India alone, we’ve seen rapid growth and now have more than eight million people there actively connecting on Facebook.”

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