Yahoo Gets Deeper In Bed With Facebook

Average users has 130 friends, spends 55 minutes a day

(NEWSER) - Facebook's runaway growth is well documented, but some details still wow, and some are quite odd. Website Monitoring takes a look at the salient facts.

• Popularity: The US has the most active users, but 70% of Facebookers are international. Sure, the UK comes in at No. 2, but No. 3 is...Indonesia? Turkey grabs the No. 4 spot, just ahead of France.

Social network and search giant switched spots over New Year's

(NEWSER) - Facebook has felled another Internet giant, surpassing Yahoo in January to become the second most visited website in the US. In December, Facebook had 132.1 million unique visitors to Yahoo’s 133.4 million. But last month the tables were turned, Mashable reports, with Facebook garnering 133.6 million unique visitors to Yahoo’s 132.0 million. The top spot, of course, belongs to Google. More»

They object in principle but end up using it by proxy

(NEWSER) - The Washington Post today profiles an increasingly rare breed: people in their 20s and 30s who don't use Facebook or other such sites. And though the “refuseniks” interviewed have different rationales—privacy, “morals and beliefs,” being “old-school in the personal touch way,” many share something in common that speaks to the pervasiveness of social networking: They use Facebook by proxy. More»

Users with no brand loyalty are a shaky foundation to build a long-lasting business on

(NEWSER) - These are rosy times for Facebook, but there's no guarantee the social networking juggernaut will even be around 5 years from now, Gary Andrew Poole writes for True/Slant. The newly profitable site is riding high, with 300 million users. But as fallen giants like AOL and veterans of the dot.com implosion attest, "our expectations have changed," Poole writes. "Brand loyalty has diminished and companies tend to go bust much more quickly." More»

(NEWSER) - Sacha Baron Cohen has partnered up with MySpace to promote his new film, Bruno, in a move that could help revive the struggling social networking site, Advertising Age reports. MySpace is hosting a movie site for the gay Austrian fashionista—MeinSpace—and the parent site has started running an unrestricted trailer. Cohen was convinced to strike the deal because Bruno could plausibly be into MySpace. More»