WebProNews

Another month has passed, and that means it's time for more social networking numbers.  These numbers break us a bit out of our usual routine, though, with a few surprising upswings in some areas and downturns in others.

Facebook still experienced a greater year-over-year rise in unique visitors than MySpace; comScore's data puts the figures at 78.6 percent and 11.6 percent, respectively.  Comparisons in the year-over-year categories of total minutes and total pages viewed yield similar results.

Yet MySpace seems to have had a better January.  Facebook suffered a 2.3 percent month-to-month drop in total unique visitors, while MySpace's audience shrunk by just 0.4 percent.  Also, there was a 13.1 percent month-over-month increase in the average number of minutes per visitor at MySpace, and Facebook headed 0.7 percent in the other direction.

So social networking growth, on the whole, doesn't seem to be as phenomenal as it once was.  And at least in the recent past, MySpace appears to have almost upended Facebook's tradition of posting more impressive growth figures.

Still, as Peter Kafka points out, a single month's data isn't anything from which lasting conclusions can be drawn.  We hold that especially true due to the passing of International Delete Your MySpace Account Day on January 30th, but it'll be early March before we find out how the event affected things in February.