Facebook may be the darling of the web 2.0 press, but it was MySpace that grabbed the most attention from consumers in June. While it’s no surprise that MySpace has retained its lead in the Social Networking Ranks, its large spike in June attention showed that the site may have more room to grow.

In April, when Facebook improved its share of attention by 23%, we highlighted where this traffic was coming from, on a state by state basis. Given MySpace’s recent spike in attention (which is even more significant given its massive size), now is an ideal time to take a closer look at MySpace visitors.

The chart above shows MySpace traffic by state for the month of June. There are a few distinct differences between this chart and the identical Facebook distribution map.

• While state population density is still a key element in visit density, a far greater share of MySpace traffic comes from California, compared with Facebook.
• MySpace receives a massive amount of visits; In addition to receiving over 25% more visits-per-visitor a month than Facebook, the site jumped to 72 million unique visitors in June, generating over 1.3 billion total visits (and forcing a large change in scale from the Facebook Map).
• Compared to Facebook, MySpace appears to have a more even geographical visit distribution.

In terms of the top 20 social networking sites, June was a positive month. The chart above shows the top 20 social networks, ranked by attention* , for the month of June. Looking at this measure of how much time users spend on a site, compared to the number of total people who use the site, gives a clear indication of successful engagement.

• The top 6 social networks all grew in terms of attention, with Bebo and Tagged both improving by nearly 50% month over month.
• Hi5, which, like big mover Tagged, just received a $20 million round of financing, fell slightly in June.
• Overall, the top 20 social networks received 13% attention in June.

June may have proven to be a good month to be a social network, but the summer’s just begun. With 3 months of warm weather and plenty of sun, the real attention may migrate offline. Stay tuned.

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