According to a recent survey, it looks like MySpace is still dominating with almost 80% of the social network visits. Facebook came in a far away second with about 12% of the remaining social network visits. According to Mashable:

Facebook’s increase in traffic is largely due to their opening up of its site for anyone, instead of its previous limitations to those with college and high school email addresses, allowing its traffic to grow 106%. And to illustrate how influential MySpace is for the entire social networking ecosystem, nearly 25% of clicks to the 19 other top social networking sites came directly from MySpace. This also highlights the fact that many people have more than one social networking persona.

While Facebook has received a good amount of backlash for several of the changes it’s made to the site in the past year, opening it up to all Internet users and adding news feed updates (we’ll see how the community reacts to Facebook’s upcoming announcement for its development platform), all the changes have paid off handsomely, increasing the valuation of the company. Great for an IPO, right?

Mashable brings up a good point. With the recent opening of Facebook to everyone, this should radically change over the upcoming few years. MySpace is just dreadful in my opinion, but Facebook’s system is set up to offer a safe and secure way for people to keep in touch.

And, speaking of Facebook, TechCrunch has fueled the rumor mill recently regarding Facebook acquisitions:

We can rule News Corp and Yahoo out. News Corp owns market leader MySpace and Facebook would seem an illogical buy. Yahoo would be out of the race on the presumption that they are looking to acquire Bebo and have failed to buy Facebook previously.

So who is left? There were rumors that Viacom was interested in Facebook last year. Viacom is still a possibility, but with a price tag for Facebook of something in the range of $3-$6 billion, it would be a stretch for a media company that has always been more conservative with online investments.

The obvious candidate is Google.

Is this really necessary? Facebook has turned down some major offers in the past and appears to be in it for the long haul. If things pick up for them (as they should), Facebook may be in the buying business soon.

On a side note, if you are interested in “friending” me on Facebook, you can see my profile here.