Very good article at ReadWriteWeb on the massive growth of Facebook:

As well as quantity, Facebook has on its side that it is a very sticky site - 50% of registered users come back to the site every day. Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month, from 24 million "active" users - 50 pages per user every day, which is very very high. In comparative terms, Facebook is now the 6th most trafficked site in the U.S. and gets more page views than eBay.

When last I saw innerbrat she made a good point to me that I hadn't considered; a lot of LJers are here for the journalling; keep in touch with friends behind a wall, etc. Facebook has that, and has been very cunning in the way they've built up. LJ always had it, but stopped developing in any coherent way a long time before 6A bought them out, and have now lost the curve. The potential new users for LJ are going to Facebook. And then some.

The recent fuss hasn't helped (news has updates, still digesting it all and watching how things pan out). Livejournal had the best elements of a blogging platform, flexible privacy options that simply don't exist elsewhere, and the potential to be a good social network, much better than MySpace. They dropped the ball (I still think limiting the directory searches to paid users is the stupidest thing ever - new users need it, new users rarely pay until they get more involved), and now Facebook is massive. For a long time I had three tabs that I opened when I booted up Fx for the evening; Gmail, my friends page and my Wordpress dashboard. When I put the blog on hiatus, I removed the dashboard. I added Facebook about three weeks ago, and I'm now spending as much time trawling there as I am on LJ.

Now we have the new applications platform, with so much coolness. RSSbook, for example; I have a feed I like, I add it, I see which of my friends also has it, and also good feeds they like. I'm not sure I like the layout, but it's cool to see other things my friends are interested, in a much more userfriendly way than having to go look at profiles. Facebook may be The One True website. The best bit? Much of it is built on Open Source technology. In fact, some of the source code comes from Livejournal itself.

I still love the LJ community, but I've been saying for ages I planned to jump ship at least partially, and host my journal elsewhere. Given the recent mess, I don't trust the LJ higher ups at all; yes, the account suspended on my friends list is back, but a simple look at the interests should have said not needing suspension in the first place. Facebook has won the social network war, Wordpress and Blogger won the free blogging platform fight, what's left for LJ. Fandom? They're leaving.

Any site like this needs new users to keep feeding in, else it withers and slowly dies. LJ is dying, and the owners are helping kill it. Ah well.