If you, like me, logged onto Facebook to share photos of a trip, brag about the basketball score or add a new city to your visit list, you may have helped bring about a new era in social networking … Facebook for the first time had more traffic than Google on a weekly basis in America.
The margin between the two giants of the internet was razor thin. For the week ending March 13, visits to Facebook.com accounted for 7.07% of all Internet traffic in the United States, according to Experian Hitwise, a company that measures online traffic. Visits to search engine Google made up 7.03%.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”
Facebook now has a recorded total of more than 400 million active users. The site has “been on a steady march for a while, on their way to becoming the top site,” said Hitwise spokesman Matt Tatham.
Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at the Altimeter Group in San Mateo and author of the blog Web Strategy, said the shift in traffic is important. “The key trend to think about here is people are spending more time talking to and interacting with each other. This does impact Google because people may be making decisions by listening and talking to each other rather than using traditional search avenues.” He said rising interest in games such as “FarmVille,” which many users play via the Facebook site, also may be contributing to Facebook’s traffic increases.
