About two years ago I published a small piece commenting on the Manchester Evening News noting a drop of several hundred thousand Facebook members.

Well, as thought the demise of Facebook or even a small drop in its popularity did not last.  It now stands at 463 million worldwide users, up from 200 million at the start of 2009.  What’s more visitors spend 261.6 minutes (per a month) compared to 178.3 minutes just a year ago.

Some more Facebook statistics to amuse and hold you in awe click here.

At the same time Bebo looks as though it will be sold or shutdown by owners AOL who paid $850 million for the site in 2008.

Figures from marketing firm comScore show the dramatic shift – Bebo’s monthly users in the UK fell by 60% from February 2009 to February 2010 to 3.8 million, while Facebook’s grew 24% over the same period to 28.1 million. MySpace fell 50% to 3.5 million.

Eden Zoller an analyst at Ovum said: “The original motive to buy Bebo made sense at the time.  In 2008 it was up and coming, growing well and had targeted and attractive demographic.  Facebook  wasn’t the huge animal it is today either.”

Lack of investment, lack of leadership, lack of innovation are cited in The Independent as some of the main reasons why Bebo has been overtaken by Facebook, which “took risks and was very focused.” (Ray Valdes VP at Gartner)

Friends Reunited suffered a similar fate to Bebo, being sold in 2009 at a fraction of the £125 million ITV paid for it in 2005.

It seems as though constant innovation and drive in social media platforms is key to their slippery hold on social networking domination.  It makes communications all the more interesting – very little stands still.

The Manchester Evening News mentioned a survey that Facebook had lost 400,000 users last month and Bebo and My Space had a drop of 2% in numbers.

Is this the end of social networking.

No!

I am not very good at maths but if you have 5 people sign on to my Artisan social networking site and they each tell 5 more people and each new friend does likewise. Then after a cycle of this occurring 10 times you have 9.7m users.

The dynamics of this mean social networking sites can gather pace quicker than an August forest fire in California. A dampening in enthusiasm members is to be expected and can easily be in the hundreds of thousands.

What it all means is that social networking sites can be as transient as a pop star: some will survive others are waiting to be usurped by new pretenders.