Friday, Aug 15, 2008    Text size: 

Although the site has yet to surpass MySpace on Alexa's global top 500, the site has become the top social network globally according to tracking company ComScore.com.

Facebook currently boasts 132 million users to MySpace's 114 million. On top of that, Facebook's popularity is growing. Compared to June 2007, Facebook had 153 percent more members sign up in June 2008.

By contrast, MySpace's growth was only up about 3 percent over the same time period.

Regionally, Facebook's rapid expansion is even more impressive over the same one-year period: In South America the site has grown about 1,055 percent; in Africa it's grown 403 percent; and in Europe it's grown 303 percent.

But what does Facebook's dominance mean for the adult industry?

More of the same. Facebook recently joined an already existing task force to add age-verification software to social-networking websites. Social-networking rival MySpace originally formed the task force when it entered into a similar agreement with 49 states and the District of Columbia.

As a part of the agreement, Facebook agreed to:

• Provide automatic warning messages when an underage user is in danger of providing personal information to an adult.
• Restrict the ability of underage users to change their listed ages.
• Personally review all requests by users to change their age.
• Display safety tips more prominently.

Some of the changes have affected how adult industry professionals promote themselves using Facebook. Language in the new deal says that Facebook will seek to "more aggressively remove inappropriate" content from the site, but it doesn't specify what inappropriate content looks like.

Also, Facebook maintains a list of pornographic websites and remove all links to such sites. As always, violators of Facebook's terms of service are in danger of being deleted from the site entirely.