Yes, I believe Facebook is the number one website where people spend most of their time for talking with friends, playing flash games, joining fan pages, using online apps, and looking for people and deals on stuff online.
I think Facebook is taking most traffic away from forums, blogs, static websites and smaller social networks like MySpace and others since it is really hard to compete with all of Facebook addictive flash games, online apps, huge community, massive amount of content, and convenience.
But, I heard Facebook can be a good place to get traffic to your website, but I feel Facebook is causing more people to spend less time on other websites since Facebook is like a Mega-Website where you can find most of the content you are looking for like photos, videos, articles by just visiting Facebook pages on your favorite hobby like fishing.
Well, I use it once in a blue moon anyway, I don't really like FB. But yeah, I believe FB's one of the most popular sites ever on the web, overthrowing twitter and other sites. But I think its behind Google, on my part.
Indeed, I rarely use Facebook as well. I mainly use it to promote my forum, and websites/blogs since Facebook is where most of the people are at, so I might as well used it to promote my forum and websites in hopes of getting a few more members.
Using search engines to get traffic also has not been very successful for me since Search engines are starting to rank Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, and other Mega-Websites higher then the average website, so Forums, social networks, e-mail and blogs are needed to get more traffic in many cases to my forum.
I notice ever since Facebook got popular a lot of smaller forums and websites I go on are not as active, but people I know from forums are active on forums. It is kind of sad that people don't choose to support tight small forum and blog communities like in the past, but choose to support giant websites more.
These days if you follow Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony's PS3 official and fan-made Facebook fanpages you can get 90% of the game console news related to releases, and new features, so in a way FB is making it harder for smaller sites about video games to get as much traffic because short status updates are good enough for many people who don't like reading long articles which are found on blogs and forums.
I still use Facebook on a regular basis myself to keep in contact with friends but it would never keep me away from forums and other forums of meeting new people and chatting.
I do agree though that it is kind of taking over the internet as regards certain things and it is putting a slight affect on the fact that some forums will not do well because of it.
But, I agree with a lot of the members who say forums are for talking about hobbies with strangers while Facebook is a place to talk about your daily life with friends and family.
I agree, it does not really affect the mod, admin, staff, and loyal members on forums as much since people who work or are loyal to forums spend more time on forums.
But, I think it affects the casual forumer who rarely logs into his forum account more because he rather chat on Facebook and other social networks instead.
When something is dominating and winning in anything (market, war, etc)...? Join them! If you can't beat them, join em. That is the tactic that many smaller websites will have to embrace. And it is something that is in my current plans
