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Facebook Attracting More Visitors Than Google.com
vikingpower writes "Internet research firm Hitwise just broke the news: last week, Facebook attracted 7.07 percent of the internet traffic in the USA, compared to 7.03 percent for Google. This is the first time google.com has been out of the top spot since it surpassed MySpace in 2007, and reflects a change in the way people use internet. They tend to privilege social interaction sites above 'passive' search engines."
Facebook still has a ways to go if you include Google's non-search properties, which bring the total up to 11.03% of traffic.
pokes google
What the hell is a "passive" search engine?
Come on, CNN. These people aren't saying "Oh, well, I have Facebook, so fuck Google"...they are just going to Facebook. What with Saint Patrick's day upon us and Spring Break happening in the near future, this doesn't surprise me, as a ton of people are likely using Facebook to organize parties and trips.
Living With a Nerd
pokes facebook
Facebook still has a ways to go if you include Google's non-search properties, which bring the total up to 11.03% of traffic.
So, in other words, the entire premise of the headline/summary/article is a lie? What would the statistics for Facebook be if you only included "search properties"?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Google introduces Gfarm.
Facebook is slowly turning into the WalMart equivalent for the internet. Sure, you could go to flickr for the photos, twitter for the updates, upcoming for the events, youtube/hulu for videos, gtalk/yahoo for IM, gmail to send messages - or you could go to facebook and have all of it half-assed.
Basically a huge walled garden which is only available to those inside the wall. The trick of course, is to make it nice so that people can bring in their data easily and fb's success is because they make it damn convenient to put your data in there.
Now, do I use facebook? Damn right, I do ... because as much bitching as I do about the effect it's having on the entire internet, I gotta move with my friends or end up falling out of touch, with everybody who already knows what everybody else is doing. And in some selfish way, my friends are more important to me than the internet.
Sad, but true.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Meh, I only went to facebook regularly because I got addicted to some of the crappy clicky games (MafiaWars and Starfleet Commander). But at some point just this month, I finally stopped feeding the urge to maintain those things... it was eating a lot of quality time out of my personal time in mornings and evenings. I pretty much avoid MMORPGs for the same reason.
The signal-to-noise ratio of most of those social networking sites have plummeted, so I rarely pay much attention to them anymore. The feeds are dominated by a handful of people who post all the time. So queue up the next big thing... or actually maybe the older sites like LiveJournal with actual content, and not just grey connective tissue. Clicky clicky linky linky can still get old and tired.
One thing that bothers me is how Hitwise gets its data...
http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/online_sidebars_backgrounders
So what does that mean? Are they analyzing DNS queries? Are they analyzing raw IP addresses? Are they analyzing raw HTTP headers? And I'd like to know more about what ISPs are signed up for this. Is it a statistical significant portion of them, or is it only a few here and there... Do those providers use high speed, mid speed or dialup connections? These are the kinds of questions that need answering to know if the conclusions that they draw are indeed valid, or if this isn't just a marketing stunt for the company...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
When I need to search for something, I put the search terms into the URL bar and Google Chrome automatically sends me to the answer page for the search query. Sometimes it even takes me straight to a Wikipedia article.
Search isn't dead, it's just transparent.
This is a vulnerability to them. They want to be YOUR portal to the rest of the internet. If they can make it easier for you to get to Facebook via Google they will. If they can pull you away from facebook into BUZZ or GoogleWave they will. The interesting bit comes around when you start getting an agreement with Facebook and Bing/Yahoo that tries to make this impossible for Google to achieve. The interwebs is a fickle hellcat, it moves at speeds of fast.
Is it only me who knows that what people do on Facebook is more of gossip spreading than anything really useful?
This is feeding into the ongoing narrative about the "social web" being the future of the web. "Passively" using the web to research things on your own is out - it's all about building social networks to get status updates on family members you don't like talking to in real life and, I don't know, playing Farmville. Note that the CNN link is in the "CNN Money" area of their website - meaning that they're already viewing the narrative as "business vs. business." Google's business model is out, Facebook's business model is in. Throw your money at Facebook and Facebook clones because search is dead, social networking is the new hotness. Nobody - and I mean nobody - ever got rich following the advice of CNN Money. They're mandate seems to be to spin out easily digestible narratives with slightly sensational headlines to grab advertising eyeballs.
So, you're counting all of Facebook's assets -- including Farmville! -- while only looking at Google's core.
Sloppy and lazy. You guys should be proud of putting this on Slashdot.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
The only thing I do on Facebook is throw cows at everyone on my friends list. Outside of that Facebook is kinda pointless to me. All these causes, games, god knows what else I find more annoying then useful. Still Superpoke is useful for tossing cows at people. When Google comes up with something that lets me do that then I'm ditching Facebook forever.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
to keep up with your friends, they aren't really your friends
facebook is for ACQUAINTANCES, not true friends, even if the word you use for an acquaintance is "friend" (which makes sense to promote the word "friend" to the realm of the more dispersonal, for the sake of corporate level public relations, which is how some people run their lives)
the point is that a true friendship is its own reward. you actually commit real work and maintenance to see them because you want to do that. if it feels like a lot of effort to do that with someone, then in emotional honesty, they aren't really a true friend anymore. as soon as someone is unimportant enough to you that you slag them off to your fake corporate public relations face, aka, facebook, they have ceased to be your friend. just admit it and move on
all facebook is is a giant mask, a bit of fakery, that requires you to constantly maintain it, as long as having a fake public face is important to you for whatever reason. facebook is turning our social lives into emotionally dead corporate facades of shallow fakery
so for a little bit of genuine, psychologically healthy friendship, stop running your private life the same way a corporation runs a public relations department. facebook users, try this: the next time you make a new friend, someone you sense could be or you want them to be a close friend, make a pact with them to "keep it off the radar"
off of facebook, off of tweets, etc. when you want to socialize with them, socialize with them directly. make your emails and phone calls terse things to actually just arrange meet up times in which real socialization actually takes place
then you will know what it is like to actually have a friend
i'd rather have two or three friends like that than 200 to 300 acquaintances on facebook, that you dutifully and exhaustively maintain a corporate mask for. but inside, no one knows you and you don't know anyone else. for those of us addicted to facebook, life has become an emotionally unsatisfying slog through fake masks of constant shallow empty cheerfulness
go off the internet, make a real friend, lose the corporate pr department
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Even if google had half the traffic of facebook it still would trump it: google knows what you are looking for in that moment so it is able to target advertisement better. Facebook on the other hand generally only knows that you are tending to your pigs in farmville, at the moment.
Even if facebook had twice traffic, it still is an easy bet that google has more reach (as a greater % of internet users access it). Just think about age/professional profiles: you know everyone uses google. You know lots of people don't use and don't care for facebook.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
I thought these social networks give you complex and irrational friends. I don't very much care about transcendental relationships. I'd rather like my friends be all natural, thank you very much.
I once had a signature.
Facebook knows your name, age, location, friends, events you attend... And unlike Google, they're not afraid to give that information to whoever's willing to pay.
More people read the TV Guide than Yellow Pages.
throws a chair at Google, using SuperPoke!
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Say what you will about Google, but its level of evil is dwarfed by Facebook's.
*You can use much of Google without logging in, even without cookies or Javascript. Try that with Facebook.
*Google gets criticized for privacy bugs in Buzz, but Facebook is entirely based on privacy violations
*Google pioneered reasonable Internet ads (text ads). Though they later added other kinds of ads, Google showed it's possible for websites to earn revenue without being totally obnoxious. Facebook ads are evil incarnate.
*Google is all about pointing people towards the World Wide Web. Facebook is about keeping people in a walled garden.
*Google's birth story is 2 geeks building a better mousetrap. Facebook was conceived in privacy-impinging, account-hacking, contract-abrogating, trust-violating sin. New developments serve to confirm these initial trajectories.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/07/234204/Facebook-Founder-Accused-of-Hacking-Into-Rivals-Email
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
then your only true friend is your job
whether you disbelieve or dislike or protest this fact is besides the point. its simply objectively the truth about the quality of your life
you don't work 11 hour days and have rich friendships outside your job. its simply not possible, unless they are with people at your job
which is fine: plenty of people have traded in their quality of life in order to get ahead in their careers, if only temporarily. but you need to admit what you are doing to yourself, and stop fooling yourself otherwise: your social life has been decimated, and plenty of people you call "friends" are at this point only acquaintances, no matter what you say otherwise
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No. You're not listening.
I converse directly with my friends over long and rambling conversations via email on a daily basis. Obviously, browsing facebook for 20 minutes isn't friendship, but talking, debating, sharing viewpoints and intimate experiences is friendship. I see and talk to 100 people face-to-face every day at work, but they are not friends. Friendship is about how you interact, and not about whether you are in the same room as the other person.
You seem convinced that you are more than an expert on friendship than the rest of us, but the more you write the more I think you have no idea what friendship is.
It sounds like you're arguing with a strawman instead of the people responding to your posts.