14 DAY TRIAL // When a new year begins, we all start to create statistics and reports regarding the year that has just passed, and to make predictions for the ongoing one. When it comes to Facebook, we could only expect it to increase its popularity and its member base even more. It is when we analyze the 2009 reports that we find the interesting aspects of this service's trajectory.
According to a study published by comScore, ever since the first Facebook accounts were created, back in 2006, the social network has attracted more and more people by the year, so that in 2009, it managed to double the total number of members when compared to 2008, going from 54.5 million visitors in December 2008, to 111.9 million users in December 2009. Furthermore, it seems that, in the US, Facebook currently accounts for 7 percent of all time spent online, and 2009 brought a threefold increase in the total time spent online than it did in 2008.
The comScore report goes even deeper into analyzing the 2009 trends to get a better overview of what Facebook has come to represent in the social activities of Internet users. For example, it appears that the number of usage days per visitor rose by 37 percent the last year, as well as the total minutes a user spends on Facebook every day. The natural consequence of more frequent accessing is that the length of each visit has become shorter (by 11 percent compared to 2008), yet the overall increase more than compensates for the only decrease in the 2009 Facebook statistics.
The growing popularity of this social platform was somehow predicted (and hoped for) in 2008 by Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when he declared that "I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before. That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more."
Even if his expectations were not taken too seriously at the time, his words became famous as Facebook is indeed one of the largest social services available at the moment. More and more users join every day, and more interaction brings more and better content, which in turn leads to more reactions from other members, thus building "a virtuous cycle of interaction," as comScore described it. What's left to say is that we are yet to see if the ascending trend of Facebook continues in 2010 at the same rapid pace as it did in 2009.
