Facebook Second Most Popular Site in US

With more than 133 million unique visitors in the month of January 2010, the largest and by far the most popular social networking site in the world, Facebook has climbed to the second position in the most popular site in the United States. This was achieved when it overtook Yahoo in January 2010. The only site above Facebook now is search engine giant Google. And considering the fact that Google had more than 148 million unique visitors for January 2010, they are going to be at the top for some time to come at least.

Launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was an instant hit, and now barely 6 years later it has more than 400 million users all over the world, a statistic that vouches for the popularity of the site. In January 2009, Facebook was ranked as the ' most used social network', ahead of MySpace. It was also featured on Entertainment Weekly's 'end-of-the-decade best-of' list, once again establishing its claim of being the most popular social networking site.

Interestingly, it was Yahoo who was with the number one spot till 2008, when Google overtook them, and now barely 2 years later, it is social networking giant Facebook that has gone past them. This, in spite of the fact that Facebook is competing for users on some level with Twitter, which is growing alarmingly fast. Twitter, which was launched in 2006, already has almost 22 million unique visitors and is often referred to as the SMS of the Internet. But based on the latest numbers, it seems that Facebook is growing from strength to strength and it will be very interesting to see if they can manage to close the lead or even overtake Google.

With American users spending almost 12% of online time on Facebook, as compared to 4.25% on Yahoo, and 4.1% on Google, the stage is all set to see if Facebook can usurp Google and become the most popular site in the US.