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28 March 2008Social Networks Show Evidence of Decline
Recent reports of social networking's demise may be slightly premature.
Some leading industry experts are reporting that the social networks of the internet such as MySpace and Facebook are beginning to show trends of slowing down.
And there has been a 5% slowdown in new UK users to the larger social networks, Facebook and MySpace, between December 2007 and January this year.
But Alex Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online which carried out the research that shows the decline, says:
"The slow down in social networks is being somewhat exaggerated. It's a natural form of any growth that we see in the online eco-system."
"Something starts from a very small base and grows very quickly. It becomes popular, but then it's only natural at some point that the growth has to stop, because it cannot carry on growing at that rate, because there is only so many people it can grow into."
So even though the big players in the social networking arena show evidence of a slow down in growth, they still dominate the attention of millions of users from around the globe.
This is still down to the fact that they provide the consumer to consumer service and still provide the tools which allow people to provide information to one another.
"I think you are going to see a lot of businesses coming up thinking how do we tap this power of social interaction, trusted friends and different advice, to make money,"
says Travis Katz, managing director, international, at MySpace.
"I think some will figure it out and others won't," he adds.
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