Selena Frye for TechRepublic:

We’ve seen the rapid rise of Facebook; are we going to see it die just as quickly as it burst in to life?

Short and sweet? No.

Quite simply because social networking websites come and go. There have been too many to mention and eventually people get bored with them and move on to something new.

Name me one network that innovated but still died. People get bored when there is nothing new. Keep innovating, and people will stay. Also, how many social networks out there have changed the way we look at the service itself?

Ever seen developers join a network? Facebook got thousands of developers to join in on the application development fun, and promised them very tangible (and real) revenue streams. Those applications, while annoying, are also a reason people are drawn to Facebook (believe it or not).

How about people like Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington? Facebook boasts the most elite group of users of any other social network. That’s not by fluke.

Five percent fewer people in the UK visited Facebook in January than in the previous month. That’s 400,000 people who decided not to log on any more.

Zuckerberg has something else to say.

I’ve had three or four friends tell me they’ve left Facebook in the past few weeks.

When you have millions, three or four doesn’t make a difference. Plus, consider what value those users were adding to Facebook. The common user doesn’t do jack. A developer, on the other hand, is an asset. I left Orkut to be on Facebook full-time. Instead of sharing my identity in multiple places, I pull in everything out of Facebook for others. There are others like me, and if they leave, Facebook will lose actual ‘users’¹.

One of the biggest complaints was the pointless garbage generated in bulk by applications-someone throws a chicken at all of their friends, someone else sends a video and so on.

And yet these same applications have 3 million+ users. The blasphemy!

Facebook was great as a way of keeping in touch with your friends. They should have kept it simple-friends, photos, groups and messaging. What more does a social networking site need?

If they had, we would have probably never even heard of a Facebook. If we had, the complaint would have been the overly simplistic approach and ‘nothing-new’ syndrome. If you’re bugged by applications, Facebook has actively taken steps to make sure people are not spammed invites. What more does a user need?

Unfortunately I think Facebook is doomed to the same fate as MySpace which saw 14% of its UK users disappear over the past three months. I bet Yahoo are glad they didn’t pay $1 billion for it!

If Yahoo! had, Microsoft would be investing in them, not buying them flat-out. MySpace is losing people (even though it’s the biggest network out there) because there is nothing new. They are playing catch-up to Facebook, and the general un-organised, un-restricted usage of “profile” pages is a major immediate turn-off! People get bored of that kind of stuff.

Facebook and social networking is not dying, and never will. The more new ways of connected you give to people, the more they’ll use it. Every new concept is a trial-and-error. If it strikes, you pat yourself and think of something new. If it doesn’t, you fix it until it strikes. Facebook has taken more risks with the concept of “social networking” than anyone, and they’ve reached where they have because of it.