No Space

October 29th, 2006

Two recent articles that suggest that use of huge social network sites like My Space may be on the decline.

First, this one from the WSJ:

“While it takes a critical mass of users to make these sites work, having too many users alienates some, especially when they attract an ever-growing cacophony of advertising and in some cases, spam. Both MySpace and Facebook lost visitors in September, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a Web-tracking service. The number of unique U.S. visitors at MySpace fell 4% to 47.2 million from 49.2 million in August, and the number of visitors to Facebook fell 12% to 7.8 million from 8.9 million.”

I’ve been thinking about niche sites lately and think that Wikis will go this route. I spoke alot about this in Monterey this past week. Th emajor Web 2.0 review sites have been discussing niche social networking sites as well and I think a smaller community of like users will boost the ROI of social networks.

Here’s another similar article from the Washington Post:

“Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle. Within several months’ time, a site can garner tens of millions of users who, just as quickly, might flock to the next place, making it hard for corporate America to make lasting investments in whatever’s hot now.”

Now, it may take a while for these sites to be passé, but I do think that it will happen.

Look for more narrow, more focused social network sites to take over and be more effective in bringing like minds together.

Comments are closed.