comScore: Facebook Catches MySpace in U.S.

Although it’s only Tuesday, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Facebook execs start characterizing this as their best week ever.  First the vanity URL offering went off without a hitch.  Then the Swahili language version launched.  Now, new unique visitor stats indicate that Facebook may have defeated MySpace in May.

Almost exactly one year ago, comScore claimed that Facebook had caught up to MySpace on an international level in this respect.  But MySpace was still quite a ways ahead in terms of unique visitors in the U.S.

Unfortunately for new CEO Owen Van Natta, Erick Schonfeld reports, "Facebook is now as large as MySpace in the U.S., according to May data released today by comScore.  Facebook actually passed MySpace by a smidgeon, with 70.278 million unique visitors compared to MySpace’s 70.255 million."

 

And as the graph shows, it doesn’t look like the two companies are going to remain neck-and-neck for very long, either.

In other growth-related Facebook news, engineer Chris Piro announced last night that over 1 billion Facebook Chat messages are being sent per day.  Again, it looks like Facebook’s on track to have a really fantastic week.