By arnoldzafra on February 9, 2009 10:35 PM

As Facebook Takes Over MySpace, Twitter Becomes the No. 3 Social Network

If you take glimpse of Compete’s latest re-ranking of social networks based on monthly visits, you’d not be surprised that Facebook is the no.1 site, followed by MySpace. But wait, somewhere not far behind at number 3, all of sudden is Twitter. So, are we seeing the inevitable? Facebook’s dominance as the top social site and Twitter’s dominance as the pseudo-social networking/microblogging/lifestreaming site?

Of course we’ve already told you before the Facebook has grown bigger than MySpace in December. And the gap is even getting bigger since December 2008.

Interestingly, Twitter which was previously ranked #22 is now ranked #3. Thanks to the surge of monthly visits that the site has been receiving. Most of these monthly visits are repeat visitors though and not really unique visitors. This is understable since Twitter is more of a microblogging site than a social network. If you could see from the chart, Twitter only got around 5million plus UV. And yet, managed to get into number 3 because of the total monthly visitors which count those returning visitors.

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Now, if Twitter manages to get more unique visitors in the coming days, which mean more new users registering at the site, soon it may even overtake MySpace which seemed to be stagnating in terms of growth.

Twitter has the potential to grow, no doubt about that. But to achieve Facebook’s level of usage, membership activities, and perhaps usage would mean that Twitter has to become a full social networking site. Unfortunately that might diminish its novelty.

For now, let us be contend with Facebook as the number one social network, and Twitter as the number one microblogging site.