10 minutes of each hour online spent socially

Social networking continues to take over the Web, with Facebook leading LinkedIn, Twitter and Tumblr

The social networking rocket is speeding right along.

In spite of a report from earlier this week that Facebook growth is finally slowing, social networking is still one of the most important avenues of the Web. While in 2007, social networking accounted for just one out of every 12 minutes spent online, it now makes up one for every six minutes, according to comScore.

Facebook didn’t take too kindly to this week's earlier data, showing the site losing around six million U.S. users. Positive growth around the rest of the world seemed to make up for the loss, but Facebook still commented that the data was not providing the whole picture.

That said, Facebook (nor anyone else) can't really believe that the site will grow forever.

Writing up the new comScore data, Andrew Lipsman makes a very excellent point:

The law of large numbers says that once a site has penetrated the majority of a market, each incremental user becomes that much more difficult to attract. So given its size, Facebook’s future U.S. growth is likely to come more from increasing usage per visitor than its ability to attract new users in perpetuity.

As the site rapidly approaches an unprecedented 700 million members, it’s easy to understand that growth must necessarily slow. Now it’s up to Facebook to keep its current users more and more engaged, especially as other fresh and exciting social startups crop up in every niche.

In May, Linkedin (33.4 million visitors), Twitter (27.0 million) and Tumblr (10.7 million) each saw record U.S. audience visits. Those are some of the biggest social sites out there, but they still pale in comparison to Facebook, which saw 157.2 million monthly unique visitors in the same month.

It isn’t too surprising to see LinkedIn drive some record traffic, considering that the company has already proven to be one of the most exciting tech IPOs of the year. Not to mention the fact that it’s the first U.S.-based provider of a social network to go public. As with Facebook, LinkedIn now needs to focus on providing a service that everyone comes back to, even if just occasionally.