Facebook Fall Maybe Beginning of the End
by Liam Bailey
2008-02-23 19:10:00 ****
Massive social networking community Facebook suffered its first downturn in new visitors after almost seventeen months of growth. The downturn has been blamed by some, on the likes of politicians and big corporations creating Facebook profiles. Ironic that something politicians and executives do to increase their street cred with today's youth, should actually have the opposite effect and make the medium they choose to reach out with less credible. Nielsen online, the company who compiled the data said one month's decline was not enough to suggest a downturn in social networking across the board, or even a severe drop in Facebook's popularity, adding that it could just be a seasonal drop. Myspace and Bebo, numbers two and three of the big three social networks also suffered downturn in users, with the less popular networks like Windows Live Spaces actually seeing increased new visitors. This would suggest that it is in fact because of politicians and executives creating profiles, which has also happened on Myspace and Bebo. No doubt if Facebook's dented credibility sees Live Spaces and the other small fish become big, then the same politicians will create Live Spaces profiles. Today's youth may well run out of credible networks to visit and end up having to cyber-share their virtual community with the dastardly politicians. Some believe the Facebook fall has been caused by its middle-aged and older users becoming alienated at the number of widgets and add-ins that didn't apply to their age group. This could be true, I remember when Facebook was all over the news, journalism.co.uk ran a story: Journalists Must have a Facebook profile, or something to that effect. It is true that more middle-aged and older people have profiles on Facebook than any of the other networks. And it does stand to reason that eventually the network, created and maintained to appeal to today's youth would alienate its older members. Only time will tell if Facebook losing its older community will give Myspace and Bebo a fighting chance against the Facebook giant.
