I've been using Google Trends to track the rise of Facebook and the fall of MySpace for years. To my surprise Facebook has kept ascending up the Google search traffic for years past when I thought it would hit diminishing marginal returns of mind-share (I assumed it would level off in 2008). But it looks like it has finally reached a "mature" phase in 2011. First, let's compare Facebook, Myspace, and Google in 2008. The following is search traffic on Google for the whole world....
Now for the past 12 months....
MySpace keeps drifting down to cultural irrelevance. Google holds steady, as it has for a while now. But finally you see the possibility that Facebook's search traffic growth has started leveling off in 2011. The pattern is more evident when you look at all years:
Please note: I am not saying that Facebook is going to go through a ...
