There's no stopping Facebook!

The manner in which Facebook has been surging ahead in popularity worldwide could be a serious pointer that its competitors may have a plenty of catching up to do if they are harboring ambitions of come anywhere close to them. The phenomenal growth of Facebook has seen the world’s largest social networking company widen the gap between them and the rest, so much so that it sometimes giving us a feeling that Facebook’s number uno status in the social network space may just be beyond any other social network.
The success of Facebook is largely due to the massive presence it enjoys in English-speaking parts of the world. Save for Vkontakte.ru (a social network for Russian-speakers) which has managed to prevent Facebook from becoming No.1 in Russia, and QQ which holds sway in China, the Mark Zuckerberg-founded social network has made significant strides in pockets where it wasn’t a big draw before.
Remember: Orkut used to be the most trafficked social networking site in India not long ago, but Facebook has overtaken Google’s social network. However, Orkut continues to grab maximum eyeballs in Brazil and has so far kept Facebook at bay. Even in Europe, where Hi5 used to have a strong following, has seen Facebook cutting into their pockets and posing a serious threat to their dominance.
The social network, with over 350 million users, started 2009 competing with MySpace in the U.S. market and easily surpassed them by mid-2009, becoming the most preferred social networking destination. Facebook also added another feather to their cap when it recently surpassed 100 million monthly U.S. visitors according to November Media Matric data released by leading marketing research firm comScore.
What’s more, Facebook along with this significant milestone has also become the fourth most visited destination in U.S. after Google sites, Yahoo sites and Microsoft sites.
Interestingly, Facebook had a U.S. audience of about 2 million visitors back in November 2004 and today, it stands approximately 50 times that number, which only underlines their rapidly rising popularity.
Facebook seems to have cut every other social network to size. What will be interesting to see is whether Facebook can maintain their stupendous growth in 2010 or are we going to see some other social network spring a big surprise and offer serious competition to Facebook? Only time will tell!