The conclusion belongs to a monitoring agency

Jan 7, 2009 10:28 GMT  ·  By

According to the Internet monitoring company Hitwise, which keeps track of some one million websites, Facebook registered the second number of hits of all online visitors this holiday season, second only to the search engine Google. On Christmas Eve, the website accounted for 1 in 22 Internet accesses, which makes it the biggest social media outlet in the world. With these numbers, it even exceeded YouTube in the number of people logging on to it.

"Christmas is always a busy time for social networking sites, but the increase this year was higher than expected. After the boom of these sites in the last couple of years growth is now slowing down. But these figures prove they're becoming central to people for keeping in touch with loved ones," says Robin Goad, research director at Hitwise, a UK-based company.

He adds that most people entered the site during Christmas time in order to get connected with loved ones, families and friends from far away, and also to greet one another, preferring the Internet over more traditional communication means, such as letters, text messaging or phone calls.

Psychology experts say that this was to be expected, and draw attention to the fact that all social media outlets have experienced substantial increases in visitor numbers over the last years, especially around holiday times, such as Easter, Christmas and New Year. They say that this trend will go up in the next years, before finally leveling off.

And it makes a certain amount of sense for things to be that way, considering the fact that college friends, once they've finished their studies, move to various parts of the country, or even abroad, which makes it difficult for them to get in touch with each other. Some move, some change their phone number, but almost all of them keep the same social media account, which they can access from anywhere.