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If you sort the Rank by Twitter, you'll see Brazil is the only place where Twitter outranks Facebook, which I would attribute to the Orkut dominance that pre-dated Facebook in that country.
And users are not everything (and people searching google are NOTHING). Twitter has had huge impact News and News gathering. Facebook is/has revolutionized the game industry (or created the casual games industry) POV.
On a related note, I've been on the partial Twitter firehose and I've only seen around 5 million unique users over a couple of months. Granted this is the partial firehose, but I'd still expect the number of uniques to approach the true number of active users over a long enough time period. I'm seeing comparitively few new users at this point. One other researcher I've talked to has similar results, anybody else gath…
To think about it, this isn't all that surprising Facebook has to many users that a lot of people use google to get to Facebook (some just blindly clicking on the first link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... ) To me it seems like Twitter just hasn't spread to the computer illiterate crowd, so this kind of graph is unsurprising.
Navigational search definitely has a lot to do with the graph. I don't think that's computer illiteracy, though. That's just how the normals use the internet ;) We techies are the fringe. http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and-normals/ I see the navigational search as an indication of mainstream adoption.
To think about it, this isn't all that surprising Facebook has to many users that a lot of people use google to get to Facebook (some just blindly clicking on the first link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... ) To me it seems like Twitter just hasn't spread to the computer illiterate crowd, so this kind of graph is unsurprising.
To think about it, this isn't all that surprising Facebook has to many users that a lot of people use google to get to Facebook (some just blindly clicking on the first link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... ) To me it seems like Twitter just hasn't spread to the computer illiterate crowd, so this kind of graph is unsurprising.
Google Trends is an extremely poor source of data if you're trying to extrapolate any real-world meaning.
Many underestimate the difference caused by Facebook using Real Names while Twitter uses @shortnames.
And unless you explain this in some detail, many will continue to do that.
There's an additional layer of mapping added when using shortnames - the user has to remember a whole list of "@donkey2001,Joe Smith" tuples; most people (and especially non-geeks) like and operate better with fewer layers of abstraction.
The usage of a full name on Facebook makes explicit the roughly one-to-one correspondence between accounts and actual-people that is expected by users and required by the service; Twitter users openly create multiple profiles with different names and even identities, and the service and tools encourage that. In that sense, Twitter has more of a sense of a masquerade or Halloween party and less like a business meeting or high-school reunion.
Each has its strengths and its place, and the longer I use both, the less I feel like there's direct competition between the two.