According to some new numbers included in an email from Nielsen Online today, Windows Live Spaces, never a big player in the US market for social networking tools, lost significant ground over the past year.
Nielsen Online provides February's top U.S. social networking sites and blogs
for your reference. They are ranked by unique audience and rounded to the nearest
thousand, so MySpace.com had 55.4 million unique visitors in February 2008, growing
4 percent over February 2007.
Please note that these are custom lists compiled by the Nielsen Online PR team
with the help of our media analysts. While these lists are not meant to be exhaustive,
they provide a good idea of the significant players in each space.
Table 1: Top 10 Social Networking Sites for February 2008(U.S., Home and Work)
+----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| Site | UA (000) | UA (000) | % Change |
| | Feb-08 | Feb-07 | |
+----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| Myspace.com | 55,419 | 53,362 | 4% |
| Facebook | 20,043 | 9,923 | 102% |
| Classmates Online | 12,955 | 12,815 | 1% |
| Windows Live Spaces | 7,882 | 9,253 | -15% |
| LinkedIn | 7,392 | 1,990 | 271% |
| AOL Hometown | 6,004 | 8,907 | -33% |
| Club Penguin | 4,727 | 3,233 | 46% |
| Reunion.com | 4,323 | 4,348 | -1% |
| AOL Community | 3,337 | 4,641 | -28% |
| Flixster | 2,619 | 1,591 | 65% |
| Buzznet.com | 2,526 | 1,332 | 90% |
+----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
Source: Nielsen Online
Myspace.com, although it hasn't received the press coverage recently that Facebook and LinkedIn have, remains at the top, and continues to attempt to innovate with the addition of the Myspace platform, to somewhat mixed reviews. LinkedIn is about ready to overtake Spaces in total unique audience, as Windows Live Spaces continues to underperform, with only troubled AOL (who are at least trying to do something by buying Bebo) losing more in the past 12 months.