I got curious about this question when reading the comments Mathew Ingram’s recent post on social networks and uptime. Mathew noted the curious case of Twitter, which is the social network “that everyone wants to use” despite it’s near-legendary struggles with downtime last year. Another commenter asserted that Imeem was actually more popular than Twitter (really? hmmm, maybe that comment was planted by Imeem).
Anyhow, this got me thinking about ways of measuring popularity. I could have easily just looked up traffic stats for social networks on compete.com, but that’s too straightforward.
Instead, I turned to my favorite quick-and-dirty buzz tracker – Neilsen’s BlogPulse. After all, a reasonable way to measure something’s popularity is to look at how much it’s being talked about. Tracking blogosphere mentions of social networks also removes the bias inherent in tracking mentions on the social networks themselves.
So I punched a few keywords into BlogPulse. Here’s their track of blogosphere mentions of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace over the last 2 months:
Facebook still gets more mentions than Twitter, MySpace getting less attention
Facebook’s recent spike no doubt due to the terms of service kerfuffle. Funny, the Facebook and Twitter lines seem to rise and fall in lockstep with each other — I guess there’s a lot of posts out there comparing these two. (Like this one.) And it looks like people have pretty much stopped talking about MySpace in the last few weeks, despite healthy chatter before Xmas.
Here’s another one, to test that assertion about Imeem in comparison with attention hogs Facebook and Twitter.
Imeem? Did somebody mention Imeem?
Ha ha, looks like almost nobody at all is talking about Imeem. I guess bloggers don’t like music or something.
What's a spaghetti test?
