Myspace going down? a cat makes life fun

Facebook keeps powering its way toward an initial public offering as the  winner of the battle for dominance among social networks. I wonder how worried Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, is when he considers the ranks of his fallen rivals.

The most recent is MySpace, the music-dominated social network that was also growing rapidly when it was bought by News Corp for $580m in 2005. Things have changed - News Corp is now warning that MySpace faces a harsh fate if it does not do better soon.

MySpace is not, however, the only social network to have flourished for a time and then to have stalled as soon as its growth spurt ran out. Before that came Friendster and Bebo, among others - Networks have a distinct tendency to flame out after a promising start.

The big question, then, is whether the same will happen to Facebook. At the moment, there is no sign of it and Facebook is clearly adroitly run - it is now extending its dominance on computers to the mobile world, as Jemima Kiss records.

There are good arguments for why Facebook is now so embedded into people’s lives that it will have staying power even when growth slows. Its users have spent many hours building up friend lists and posting photos and other personal material to the site.

Yet in previous internet generations, services such as AOL and Yahoo had similar advantages. It did not stop their users abandoning ship when they passed their peak.

Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/954981/is_myspace_going_down.html?cat=15