Does the Facebook loosing its popularity?

[Wanikiya]

[Steven]

yes for the new of raping and stalking yes

[nmnf_43]

No, it just recently topped Myspace as the most popular social networking site. It will probably be a while before something else steals the thunder.

[Bob]

I guess Facebook is not losing its popularity but it increases its popularity. This is because the visitors of this site increases everyday. In fact, the site ranks 10 in search engine and Google was defeated on the numbers of visitors visiting Facebook everyday.

[Matthew]

At nytimes.com, Virginia Heffernan wrote a piece called Facebook Exodus in which she says “According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously."

As for Twitter, Mark Gimein at Slate.com’s The Big Money thinks “Twitter is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. Not because of its problems keeping up with traffic—those are solvable—but because the volume of material that Twitter unleashes now puts impossible demands on its users' time and attention. The problem, in a nutshell, is information overload. The more Twitter grows and the more feeds Twitterers follow, the harder it gets to mine it for what is truly useful and engaging.” She notes that people have been quitting Facebook for a variety of reasons including disliking how nosy it made them (agreed), feeling the scene had turned desperate (agreed), fearing stalkers (agreed) and feeling that ones privacy was being compromised (agreed).

So what does this all mean? Will Facebook dissolve forcing us to go back to, gasp! Interacting with our friends in person!? Will Twitter shut-down meaning we might be left to, dare I say? Sit with our thoughts?! (Remember the days when being "followed" was a bad thing that potentially required getting a restraining order? Now we freely share our wearabouts with the world! Btw, I'm writing this blog post while sitting on a park bench on the corner of 23rd and 5th) I already tried to quit Twitter and I ended up going right back. There are a lot of things I don't like about Facebook, yet I can't stop posting on my profile (I am so posting this blog entry on my profile). What I'm saying is, as much as I'd love a life where I am logged off, I don't know if that's possible without feeling left out. I don't know, can we go back to a life pre-social networking?

For the most part, Facebook and Twitter have served me well for career networking, promoting my work, reconnecting with old friends, and of course remembering everyones birthdays. But the negative effects, like-how much time I have spent creepingly wasted scrolling through peoples profiles, the annoying amount of things I know about people that I don't think I should know, the sadness I have felt while viewing photos of events I was clearly not invited to- those are things I'd love to do without.

But isn't it inevitable that all such popular things must come to an end? (Ain't that right MySpace?) Will something more popular, more powerful, more annoying will take over wherever Facebook leaves off? Oof, such thoughts make thinks my lapptop and head will explode.

What do you think? Have you thought about quitting your social networking sites? Are you one of those few folks who never even joined? If so, do you feel left out or do you feel fine n' free? Will there ever be life without social networking? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below (or share your thoughts as your status update, I'm sure I'll see them assuming you're one of my random 1,793 "friends")

Big thanks to my pal Anna Goldsmith for directing me to the Nytimes and Slate articles.