Interesting Blog post on the decline of Social Networking 2.0

http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/social-networking-may-be-declining-social-interaction-wont/

Social networking may be declining, social interaction won’t

February 8, 2008

[Vanelsas] read a Business Week article this morning which suggests that the current MySpace generation is becoming fed up with the ad bombardments on the site. They seem to be spending less time on MySpace because of it. A quote from the article:

The MySpace generation may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages. The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market researcher ComScore. MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72 million users in October to 68.9 million in December, ComScore says. The total number of people on such sites is still increasing at an 11.5% rate, but that’s down sharply from past growth rates. “What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising,” says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, which places ads for customers on a variety of Web sites.

I don’t really know if we are now seeing a decline that marks a steady downfall of the current social networking sites. There seems to be contradicting numbers around. TechCrunch, for example, showed in January that Facebook is still growing in traffic, while MySpace is going down. According to Mashable traffic is increasing and they use a totally different measure, using the traffic measures from one of the largest content delivery networks Akamai. According to Akamai, they have delivered 5 times more data over their network to social networking sites in the last year. this suggests that people are spending more time on social networking sites…