Facebook Bigger than Google

At least according to Hitwise's latest data for the week ending March 13, 2010: Facebook beat Google as the most visited U.S. Web site for that week.

Facebook had actually reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day (as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th). Presumably, a lot of people posting updates about their progressing state of drunkeness and overfedness...

Marketing Pilgrim points out  that Hitwise's methodology is fraught as they're comparing all of Facebook (videos etc...) against only google.com. Thereby leaving out Gmail, YouTube and other Google properties. Good point, but it does raise a couple of others:

While Hitwise may be comparing full oranges to orange quarters (rather than apples), the methodology is consistent over time and does show Facebook's growth on a property Vs. property basis. And it excludes any Facebook data for traffic from mobile phones... In other words, the headline overpromises but the data do point in the right direction. 

Beyond the ooh ahhing at social media's incredible growth and Facebook's in particular, what's interesting are the implications in the way people are using the Internet. And their relationship to the Web is changing. 

It's not going on THE Internet anymore, it's increasingly MY Internet. In fact the very vocabulary of "going online" or "being online" are starting to sound archaic as people are always online and updating their Facebook profiles through blackberries and iPhones.

Search was the big thing of the 2000s and its one-way information retrieval process is now being overtaken by Connectivity (and a multiplicity of (largely social) information exchanges. Social media's growth is hardly a scoop, but the shift and rebalancing from information search/retrieval to information exchange marks a new relationship and level of intimacy between Internet technology and people.