There seems to be a new post a day about the rise and rise of social networking. You may be getting sick to death of hearing about Facebook, Twitter, and even the smaller services like Flickr, Myspace and LinkdIn, especially if you're one of the few who hasn't jumped on the bandwagon, but the truth is that social-networking is both an internet and cultural phenomenon. You only have to look at the influence of Facebook in the Egyptian revolution and the high-profile court cases involving Twitter to see how significant social-networking is.
The latest figures show that it is now only Google that gets more visitors than Facebook. Think about all the pages out there on the web. If you can think of it, it's online, you can literally do anything now, via your computer, or even your mobile phone, so to be the second most visited site in the UK is huge and it's came out of nowhere. A few years ago, social-networking was a novelty.
Surprisingly it is thought that one of the key aspects of the success of Facebook is the over 50s crowd. It's easy to assume internet crazes are aimed at the youngster of the population, but teens and adults alike are flocking to Facebook. “The growth in audiences to these social networks is now primarily being driven by the 50-plus age group,” said UKOM general manager James Smythe.
The question now, is how long can the likes of Facebook grow before they hit wall. There's already whispers of Facebook user fatigue and we must look at the glorious collapse of Myspace which was once the king of the internet.