While I am part of the Facebook bashers (well, bashers of the current Facebook craze), I always feel that I am dead wrong, since so many folks are still signing up and using it.
But recent reports (link below) are hoping to sound the death-knell for Facebook and other social networking services.*
Eh, I’m an impartial skeptic and will only believe any slow-down after a few months, no matter how well the indictor (remember, only one indicator in one country) might support any of my arguments.
But, speaking of other indicators, Google has click-through issues with AdSense and MySpace also is showing a UK slowdown (see link below). Is this the bursting Bubble 2.0 (funny video) everyone loves to speculate about?
Nah. If anything, just the natural flow of users from network to network.
Link: ‘Facebook fatigue’ hits networking website | Business | The Guardian:
British internet users are falling out of love with Facebook and the social-networking site has shed 400,000 visitors between December and January, the website’s first decline in users.
Facebook remains the UK’s most popular social-networking site with 8.5 million unique users at the end of January, according to new figures from Nielsen Online. But that is down from 8.9 million in December.
*Indeed, we’ve seen in our research, already early last year, early-adopter burnout. Hence my harping about the rise of Vox and Twitter and Jaiku, closed circle social networking. I’m just wondering what’s next (and I have my ideas).
As the article you pointed a few posts before mentions, the so-called “people-centric social networks” eventually face “what’s next?” issue – which is why we have “Cyworld fatigue” in Korea and they have “Mixi fatigue” in Japan.
Chang,
Good to know. But is it fatigue or just lack of the next thing to go to?
Tchau,
Charlie
For me it just has too much – The huge community is so widely distributed that the groups etc don’t reach critical mass of numbers. This spread makes it superficial – too many people doing too many things – there is no depth…. This makes it deeply unsatisfying after a while.