There’s More To The FaceBook Traffic Story

Om Malik says Facebook traffic is tanking, based on the September Comscore data which shows a 9.3% decline in uniques v. steady uniques at MySpace.

There’s a problem though - he’s showing unique visitor data but talking about traffic. The Comscore data for U.S. traffic shows only a 4% decline, from 15.2 billion to 14.7 billion page views. MySpace declined 2% in that same period.

And the data is also only taking U.S. traffic into account. Over the last year, non U.S. users have grown to become more than half of Facebook’s total audience. Comscore worldwide data runs a month behind U.S. data, so that information is not yet available for September.

But the bottom line is, there isn’t enough information yet to make any kind of definitive statement about Facebook traffic. It’s also worth noting that something very similar may have happened last year (a September dip in traffic) At the very least we need to wait for the international data.

Data is below - unique visitors is top, below is page views.

Does Chess Need to be Crowdsourced?

A new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).

I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?

Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?

picture-186.png