Madmusings first e-mail bulletin to me from those crazy guys at MAD, a valuable source of marketing news, certainly grabbed my attention.
So what are those wild cats on about?

Simply that Facebook, far from waning in popularity is still on an upward curve, with new sites being launched specifically for Germany, France, Spain and China.  It could be just the start.

As madmusings points out Facebook has been dismissed as a fad, among the number of critics is Rupert Murdoch who said it was “more of a directory.”  Well you would say that….especially if you had pulled off a master stroke, worthy of Monty Pansear’s batting (which is not good), of buying MySpace’s parent company for a “cool” £330 million.  Better to have invested in Coke, the drink or even the coal derivative, seeing we are using that colourful imagery.

One thing is clear MySpace was in the international market with country specific sites long before Facebook.  But who would you bet on to succeed in a couple of years?

Tom Cheesewright of IO Communications told me (I am going to be pulled up on this aren’t I?) that the Internet allows the best sites to succeed even if they are new entrants to the market.

The traditional marketing model is that the first in usually captures the biggest share, I think it is 30% or 40% if I remember all that education.  Early followers grab a lot of the remainder and the rest , the crumbs.

As for the attention grabbing headline?  It grabbed my attention, even if did not quite live up to its shock value.

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.