InformationWeek reported on Monday that Facebook now accounts for nearly 25% of pageviews and 10% of Internet visits. This was compared to Google which, with its YouTube property, only accounted for a combined 11.7% of page views.

This data point, along with Facebook’s half a billion users, shows how difficult it is today to create a competing social media offering.

While studying for my MBA at Haas (UC Berkeley), I was a co-chair of the student association’s communications committee. One of our goals was to improve communication between students, who were part-timers and were split between weekend and weekday evening classes. One of the solutions I looked at was Ning, which allows you to create and customize your own online social network.

The feedback I got was “Oh no! Yet another site to log into!”.

Even in those days, a lot of folks were already on Facebook and the reality of social media is that you do spend some time and effort to build up your network of friends and acquaintances. So having to sign on with yet another site and restart the network building process is just too much of a bother. This is the “switching cost” effect.

The popularity of Facebook has not prevented entrepreneurs from considering new approaches to social media. For example, Path is a new site that allows you to share your photos with 50 of your closest friends. The 50-friend limit comes from the observation that while you may have several hundred friends on Facebook, you really only interact with a small subset of them on a regular basis. To quote a wise-cracking social media expert: “Those who are stalking you and those whom you are stalking”.

The other noteworthy aspect about Path is that it does not try to replace other social networks but work alongside them.

This is probably the direction of where social media is going: it is pretty much impossible to replace Facebook at the moment. New innovations in social media will leverage basic Facebook features (user authentication, user status updates and friend networks) and then build additional value on top of Facebook.

An example of this approach is dailymile. This is a site for fitness enthusiasts to write about and keep track of their training. You can either create a separate dailymile login (if you want to remember yet another set of usernames /passwords) or log-in via Facebook. Your dailymile status can also be shared on Facebook.

Essentially, dailymile leverages your existing social network (Facebook) and expands on that to create a separate social network in parallel, as the following graphic illustrates:

When you start using dailymile, you share details about your daily workouts on Facebook. When your Facebook friends see you using dailymile, they also sign up. This creates a snowball effect and results in a sub-network of “shared users”. Your daily workout also appears on the dailymile website which is visible to other dailymile users. They can send you “friend” requests. This creates a secondary sub-network that is external to Facebook.

I have not been on dailymile long enough to see if this external network will be larger than the shared one. It is possible since dailymile caters to a shared interest and passion among its users. Hence, there is a higher propensity for users to want to connect with each other.

Dailymile will probably never replace Facebook, but its approach to social media is a good example of how innovation can take place in spite of Facebook’s ubiquity.