Top Five Social Networking Sites

263,000,000 people are on MySpace.  Traffic on Twitter has increased by 600% in the past year.  A new movie about the creation of Facebook, entitled The Social Network, is slated to come out in 2010.  How do you guage the most significant, important, or popular social networking site?

At 263,000,000 MySpace has far and away the most users of any site.  And yet, according to a study by Social Media Optimization, Facebook gets over 1,100,000,000 hits per month, compared to Myspace's mere 800,000,000.  And where is Twitter in all of this?  Twitter is not even a social network, according to many studies.  Twitter is only a micro-blog, albeit the most popular micro-blog by far, and rapidly developing into a social network.  Social Media Optimization, which did include Twitter in their rankings, watched it move from #22 last year to #3 this year (with only 54,000,000 hits per month, and 14,000,000 users leaving it far behind MySpace and Facebook).

And LinkedIn?  LinkedIn is the responsible older brother of preppy, popular Facebook.  As useful as it is, somewhere along the way LinkedIn has sunk to #5 on Social Media Optimization's list of networks.  Fixster, Friendster, Tagged, and Bebo surround it, with similar numbers of users and hits.  With Yahoo! and Google both adding Social Networking elements to their pages, and roughly half of Twitter users not posting, the determining factors of what makes a social network, and what determines popularity may continue to change in the next year and beyond!

Here's a quick image I particularly like, anthropomorphizing a handful of popular websites.  Enjoy!