It may seem bizarre to wonder if a Web site with 124 million registered users has seen better days, but The Washington Post nevertheless asks if that might be true of MySpace, the wildly popular social network.
The Post boils much of its argument down to a hard-to-dispute precept: Teenagers, the site's driving force, are a finicky lot. But adolescent caprice may actually be less of a problem for MySpace than technology's forward march: More attractive, less public sites like Facebook are are cutting into the social network's market share.
The Post does offer a useful suggestion for gauging a social-networking site's popularity — by measuring the amount of time users spend on it in a given month. MySpace's average monthly-usage figures seem to have plateaued, but Facebook's are still slowly climbing, the newspaper notes.
Still, if the experiences of Friendster and Xanga are any indication, Facebook may peak sooner than its creators would like. So even at colleges where Facebook is still all the rage (that is, most of them), campus officials should keep an eye out for new social-networking crazes on the horizon. –Brock Read
