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Facebook most-visited social networking website
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-12 11:43

SAN FRANCISCO - Compete.com has crowned Facebook the most popular social networking website, saying it racked-up nearly 1.2 billion visits in January.

The Internet-tracking firm released social-networking website rankings that show MySpace slipped to second place during the course of the past year while micro-blogging service Twitter catapulted to third place from 22nd.

News Corp-owned MySpace saw approximately 810 million visits in January, while Twitter was visited 54.2 million times, according to Compete.

"No surprise here," a Compete reader using the online name Bauer said in a comment viewable Wednesday at a chat forum at the US firm's website.

"Facebook has evolved much better and always has something new to offer. I don't get Twitter though, I don't think people care to read live updates on what percentage of my burger I;ve eaten."

The number of visitors to social-networking websites and the amount of time they dwell there are considered key indicators of how well Internet services are doing.

Facebook and Twitter have registered increases in both categories while visits and time spent at MySpace have stagnated or slid during the course of the past year, according to Compete.

"MySpace is still the clear number two player in the big categories, but its trends in some key areas aren't quite so dominating," Andy Kazeniac of Compete wrote in an online posting discussing the rankings.

"At least in those areas, they could be looking up at more than Facebook soon."

Flixster, Linkedin, and Tagged were ranked fourth through sixth places respectively, each gaining in popularity from January of 2008.