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if the latest measures from comscore are to be believed, the facebook-myspace gap is becoming smaller by the month. while myspace (user base) is still around four times the size of facebook, the younger social network’s growth (unique visits) is over three times that of myspace and if the sites continue to grow at the same rates, their market penetration will be even within the year.

vital stats according to comscore (press release):

MySpace
Total Unique Visitors (June 06): 66,401
Total Unique Visitors (June 07): 114,147
Year-over-year growth: 72%

Facebook
Total Unique Visitors (June 06): 14,083
Total Unique Visitors (June 07): 52,167
Year-over-year growth: 270%

for argument’s sake, let’s assume that there are only two social networks in the market and that there are a total of 166,314 unique users, (114,147 for myspace and 52,167 for facebook, based on comscore statistics). myspace owns 68.63% of the market while facebook owns the other 31.37% of the market. next, assuming growth stays at the same levels, we can estimate that a year from now, myspace will have 196,333 unique visits (50.43%) and facebook will have 193,018 unique visits (49.57%), meaning they will both own about half the social networking market.

there are, however, a few caveats. it is clear that facebook has recently been enjoying explosive growth and as a result has been gaining on myspace. however, it is important to not get carried away by these statistics and be open to the possibility that this growth is a short-term result of facebook’s recently announced open platform and won’t necessarily be sustained over the long-term. additionally, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of myspace announcing a similarly open platform to counter facebook’s sudden popularity. lastly, it is important to note that i have used only comscore statistics and other measurement methods may not show similar results.