Is social networking out of fashion?

Added by The Editor, 4 months ago.

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A report last week from Nielsen Online shows that after 18 months of exponential growth, social networking site Facebook suffered its first dip in UK user numbers since its launch. After 17 months of successive growth, the number of unique users fell from 8.9 million to 8.5 million - a drop of nearly 5 per cent - between December and January.

Likewise, competitor sites MySpace (a drop of 5 per cent) and Bebo (2 per cent) experienced similar falls in subscriber numbers during the same period.

So does it mean that our love affair with social networking is over, as quickly as it began?

Probably not - one swallow doesn't make a summer. In fact, there are 712 per cent more Facebook users than this time last year, strong growth in anyone's book.

Rather, the falls were likely driven by a number of factors, including the banning of such sites at many schools and companies, with users spending an increasing amount of time communicating with online ‘friends'.

Others suggest that we have finally reached a ‘natural plateau' for online social networking sites.

But it would be good to think that the Real-Time Generation are being driven away as they finally start to make the link between posting personal information, such birthdays, CVs, mother's maiden names and employers' names, on these sites and the threat to their online security.

Not only are these sites being used by online criminals to gather personal information, but also by potential employers, who can use networking profiles of users to found out more about potential job candidates.

No-one would leave their bank statement lying around on their desk or a local coffee house. Yet in the stampede to reveal everything about ourselves on social networking sites, it seems that caution over revealing personal information has been thrown to the wind. Let's hope that the recent drop in user numbers represents some kind of pause for thought.

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Jonathan Evans, 4 months ago

On Radio 4’s Start the Week (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek.shtml) this morning, they had the academic Clay Shirky on talking about his book ‘Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations’, which looks at how the web is changing the way we interact and collaborate. While there are obviously privacy and security issues around social networks, he talked about the use of the web and sites such as Facebook to mobilise public opinion. He cited the example of HSBC and how it backtracked on its plans to charge interest on previously free overdrafts after consumers launched a huge protest via the Facebook group ‘Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-Off!’ For me, this is where the use of social networks and other collaborative technologies – like IM or Twitter – are really interesting, in changing the way consumers (particularly what you call the ‘Real-Time Generation’) interact with companies today. For organisations, it’s a wake-up call that while you may be able to snoop on potential recruits via sites like Facebook, you also need to be aware that they can use these sites for their gain too, and influence what other people say or think about your brand.

Victoria, 4 months ago

I think the plateau in user numbers is inevitable - it happened with Friends Reunited, MySpace (to an extent) and now Facebook. While I would not jump to predict the death of Facebook (after all the other social networks that were in fashion in previous years are still here) I would hope that we'll start to see more sensible discussions about the value of Facebook and other social networking sites.