[Sociam-soton] 'Social Baker' claims FB down 3 mil users

[electronic Max]

FYI Web-Observatory leaning colleagues,

I remember Nigel asking about sources of information we could use to
get a 'real time heartbeat' of the social web - what's trending,
what's winning and what's failing.

I discovered this site today which makes the rather incredible claim
that FB is shrinking (at least in the short term) across a number of
countries including the US and the UK

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/?interval=last-3-months#chart-intervals

They have similar reports for Twitter, YT, G+ and LinkedIn.

I wonder how they get these figures -- and how reliable they are, and
whether these figures are gathered by spying/illicit means or through
explicit contractual commercial relationships with the respective
platforms

Yours,
Max