Facebook, Tagged and Bebo outpacing MySpace growth rate

comScore published its latest numbers on global social network growth. MySpace.com continues to be the giant, with more than 114 million unique visitors in June. Facebook had a 270-percent increase in unique visitors from June 2006, with more than 52 million uniques, compared to MySpace with a 72-percent boost over the same time period. Tagged could be tagged the up and comer, with a 774-percent increase to 13.2 million visitors. Bebo.com was up 172 percent to 18.2 million visitors.

MySpace and Facebook have about two-thirds of their visitors coming from North America, while Bebo is strong in Europe. Google's Orkut has only 2.9 percent of visitors coming from North America, according to the comScore numbers.

The more important metric on the business front is how much time those millions of unique users across the globe are spending on the social networking sites, their demographic profiles and the the level of ad targeting that can be applied. This is the new frontier, the people-centered Web, which marketers will find increasingly attractive as a way to profits. The politics of the people Web--allowing users to be more in control of their profile information--has yet to be fleshed out, however. If Amazon is a worthy guide, the social networks will follow suit with more personalization and recommendation engines.