MySpace and Bebo are falling behind in the world of social networking. Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss recently examined their decline and their rivals' rise in the Guardian. MySpace was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in July 2005 for $580,000,000 and Bebo, big social networking site in the UK, bought by AOL in March 2008 for $850,000,000. Now MySpace is decline in terms of time spent on the site per user and number of page views. The same is true for Bebo.
On the other hand, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, three very much younger networking sites that have steadfastly refused to be bought have thrived, while their apparently better-funded rivals are struggling. Facebook has turned down approaches from Yahoo; and Twitter from Facebook. In the US, every social networking site increased its audience over the year - apart from MySpace, which lost more than 1 million unique users to fall to 63.2 million.
The authors speculated that that “social networking may, like other networking trends, be one of those elements of the internet where the winner takes nearly all: if your friends have a MySpace and a Bebo and a Facebook account, but are spending more and more time on Facebook, where will you go? The outcome is inevitable, even if it only happens slowly.”
Good points as Friendster found out. A free web service can be easily dropped. You only investment is the social capital you put into it. I found the best part of Facebook was the status field. Now I rarely use it as Twitter has replaced this function with a better service and most of my Facebook friends went to Twitter. When I go to the trouble of updating my Facebook status I usually do the same for LinkedIn that added this feature. As I have written before, I think that Twitter has the fix its interface issues and its archiving capabilities or it may go the way of MySpace and Bebo. How many micro-blogging tools do you need?
They close with a quote from John Riedl, a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota, who in 2008 noted a decline in the users of MySpace. "One of the challenges with running one of these large social networking sites is you are always trying to figure out what it is that people want and then balancing that against how do you make money off it."
Will Twitter decline before they figure out the money issue or will they make the needed fixes?
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