Valleywag
A loyal reader and apparent Facebook enthusiast notes in his Facebook status, "so valleywag apparently has a bigger boner for FB than i do ... weird, huh?" I can only assume this comment comes in response to our chart yesterday showing Facebook's vast superiority to the gang of also-rans Google has rousted up to support OpenSocial. But here's the thing. No way do we have the biggest boner for Facebook. That prize goes to Alexa. Care to inspect for yourself?
Now, we know you already know that Alexa is thoroughly broken, with a methodology so suspect as to be risible. But some of you complained that we used Compete.com for our charts yesterday. And also, there was the matter of the size of our boner to defend.
So here's how Alexa compares views of Facebook and MySpace over the past year:
By contrast, here's how Compete compares the two social networks' "people count" over the past year:
No discussion of boners for Facebook would be complete, however, without mentioning Karel Baloun, author of Inside Facebook: Life, Work and Visions of Greatness. Judging by that title alone, you should know there's your man for a big old red and meaty for the blue and white site.
Comments
That book sounds like it was written by a super villain.
If people count then I guess it's fair to call Valleywag the also-ran of tech news sites and the also-ran of the Gawker stable.
where's mcclure? :)
@ChiefCynic: Jeez man, why you gotta be so....oh
You can't talk about Facebook boners without showing the bulge in this fellow's pants:
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fyi, i assume you realize you're comparing oranges to tangerines there... the Compete graph is people; the Alexa graph is page views.
@DaveMcClure500Hats: Right, Alexa wouldn't let me put a people graph together. And there were many complaints yesterday that we didn't use Compete's people metric.
@alleywag: And, yet, here I am. So what does that say about the value and integrity of my opinion?
yup, you got me, that's no sock in my pants. thanks for mentioning my book. 5000 copies in Chinese are printing before year end, surprising me.
i'm bummed smarter people took me out of my fantasy land by educating me that alexa sucks. oh well. but i reworked the numbers comparing data sources, and facebook is probably anyway the most important SN today.
however this all plays out, it's great to be a social application developer this year.
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