Facebook’s rise over as user numbers drop again

(Number provided by the NMA Magazine, issue 20.03.2008).
It seems that the ever-growing social network Facebook has seen a slight decrease of interest in the first quarter of 2008, at least that is was statistics reveal: from December 2007 to February 2008, Facebook has experienced a fall from 8.9 million unique users to 8.3 million in the UK, that’s a considerable drop of 600,000 users in just 3 months!

Other popular social networks such as Myspace aren’t doing well either. Claiming to be the World’s largest social network, Myspace, with 110 million users, has been experiencing a downslope trends, with only 5 million unique users in February 2008 for the UK.

On the other hand, Bebo (bought by AOL last week for £417 million) is on the rise, jumping 13% to 4.6 million. Some say the “dramatic rise” of Facebook, which was once planned to be the social getaway to the web, is now over.

Over these still quite recent numbers, one is to wonder why such a popular social network would suddenly lose popularity – Is it because of the fuss that is being made around the portal, the advertising and privacy issues Mark Zuckerberg has experienced or even the ever-growing complexity of the actual Facebook interface? The Facebook people should perhaps start to re-assess their marketing goals in an attempt to reverse the alarming statistics they are getting for this new year – or it might just be the beginning of the end for Facebook. Question is, who will be the next online Giant?