Social Networking Sites Get Old

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

between August and September, traffic to almost all popular social networking sites fell: MySpace's audience dropped from 49.2 million to 47.2 million; Facebook from 8.9 million to 7.8 million; Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces from 8.2 million to 7.8 million. Although those losses could be attributed to students returning to school, the decline also comes as an increasing number of sites compete for attention and the newness has begun to fade.

Last year, Caro, a 28-year-old escrow officer who lives in Morgan Hill, stopped writing about the adventures of her three cats on Catster. She didn't have the time. Though she has been invited to join other online communities such as Yahoo 360, she hasn't bothered to sign up. She said her MySpace page is enough.

"It's getting pretty old," Caro said. "It makes no sense to have a million of those pages. I have one."

Caro kept an online cat diary for six months and hooked up her cats with about 50 friends each. "At that point, I thought, 'Who cares?' " she said. "Who cares if my cats have friends?"

I guess the law of diminishing returns applies to everything.