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Multiple Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps is one popular guy.

Times of the Internet points out that (like many others these days) Phelps prefers Facebook to MySpace.

He has recently become the second most popular person on Facebook (the first being presidential candidate Barack Obama according to Mashable), and is expected to become the first before too long.

Not only has Phelps-mania swept the world (especially his native U.S.), but Facebook has been giving him some props themselves featuring a prominent banner on the site, linking to his profile page.

At the time of this writing, he has 1,102,939 fans.

He's all over Digg (including a couple of stories on the front page), Del.ico.us, and StumbleUpon, and there's a pretty astonishing catalog of Michael Phelps-related merchandise listed on eBay.

"Michael Phelps facts" is currently the number 7 phrase in Google's Hot Trends.

Could Phelps be the most popular Olympic contender of all time? I bet he's at least giving Dan and Dave a run for their money (no pun intended).

On a related note, the Internet has been a pretty popular place for users to get coverage of the Olympics themselves too.