What does the general public think about facebook, twitter, friendfeed, etc.

I am one of those guys that starts my mornings off by catching up on my twitter and friendfeed "feed". It is great to start off your day and see if anyone found a cool youtube video, or interesting blog article that I may never have discovered.

However, over the past few weeks friendfeed and twitter became a bit less useful for me since all the conversations seemed to revolve around the two tools and which one is better. Of course, I could have tried to find a few other folks on each of those tools that discussed other topics but I was too lazy to try and find new buddies.

Then I got to thinking. If I just read my friendfeed newsfeed, I would think twitter was at the end of its life, and facebook was playing second fiddle to friendfeed. I think decided to check out google trends and see the relative search volume for the terms "facebook,myspace,friendfeed,twitter". The results bring things back into perspective. Check out the screenshots below:


You could argue the valley is at the cutting edge and folks such as Scoble are way ahead of what the general public is going to do. However, you could also argue the population of the tech geeks does not represent the general public. It is interesting when the voice of a just a few folks can you influence your viewpoint so quickly, but as always the best way to make your predictions is based on data and a lot of detailed analysis.