I noticed Michael Arrington's post on Facebook shutting down a Slide.com application and checked Hitwise data to compare Facebook and MySpace clickstream data in particular to Photography websites. The differences are interesting and highlight different interests of users as well as a different profile of user. Facebook sends far less traffic to Photography websites than does MySpace. Last week, 0.67% of downstream visits from Facebook went to Photography websites compared to 4.26% from MySpace.

Looking at it from the other perspective, MySpace accounted for 40% of upstream visits to RockYou last week and 45% of visits to Slide.com. Facebook accounted for 2.39% of visits to Rock You and and 0.65% to Slide.com.

So if MySpace users are into photo sharing, where does Facebook send its traffic? Comparing clickstream data for the two sites the top downstream categories are the same - both send their traffic to other social networks (i.e. each other), search engines, email and to portal front pages (i.e. Yahoo.com). After that things get interesting and look very different.

Last week, 4.7% of visits from MySpace went to Graphics and Clip Art websites, My Hot Comments and Google Image Search in particular, compared to only 0.84% from Facebook - representing a 5 fold difference. Some of this is no doubt a result of the ability to customize a MySpace profile and layout.

Other big differences exist in Games, Blogs, Music and Education. MySpace sends more of its traffic to Games websites, Blogs and Music and Facebook sends more to Education - in particular Education Institutions. Looking at the clickstream websites we see more traffic going to University websites from Facebook (including UMass, Ohio University, University of Wisconsin and Purdue University) than from MySpace.

The differences in clickstream highlight different interests of users of these sites as well as different demographic profiles.

Note - last week we issued updated statistics on social networks.

Heather Hopkins

Heather Hopkins is VP of Research for Hitwise UK. This piece was originally posted on Hitwise Analyst blog here.