Traffic figures released this month put Facebook ahead of MySpace in the United States for the first time, and depending on which measurement service you trust, it has either just happened or is a matter of weeks away.
I wrote in April last year that MySpace held several times the registered accounts and that the comparison being made on that basis was measuring the wrong thing entirely, because a decorated profile page built to be visited once is not the same asset as a network people actually return to. At the time, that argument required looking past the number everyone was quoting toward a different one nobody was publishing prominently.
The crossover happening now is that argument resolving itself in public, on a timeline close to the one I guessed at, for the exact reasons I described back then.
Facebook grew slower for a long time and kept the people it grew, because campus-based signup meant new users arrived already connected to people they actually knew, and an account built around a real, dense social graph is expensive to abandon in a way a decorated page with a stranger’s comment thread underneath it never was. MySpace grew faster and lost people constantly, because an open network with no verification and a design built around performance for strangers has always struggled to hold onto anyone once the novelty wore off.
Registration totals could not see any of that, because a registration total treats an account somebody opened once and never touched the same as one somebody logs into every day, and MySpace had an enormous quantity of the first kind.
I do not think this crossover is really news about a sudden shift. It is closer to a slow-motion outcome finally becoming visible in a metric people check, after having been visible for a while in the metric that actually mattered. The interesting lesson is not which network won. It is how long a genuinely inferior surface number can keep a wrong story circulating simply because it is the easiest one to put in a headline.