Social media fatigue

After all the noise and excitement which came with the dawn of Social Media, we are now seeing signs of the Web 2.0 slowing and becoming a part of everyday life. Similar to what happened with email, it was a big launch and now it’s everywhere. Nielsen Online, the online buzz monitor, showed an approximately 5% decline of users for Facebook, Bebo and MySpace at the beginning of 2008.

Time on-site has also been decreasing and one has to wonder at the factors fuelling this decline. Whatever the reason could be, and I’ll elaborate some of the possible reasons below, statistics are showing that users are delving less and less into their social networks, or at least practising some moderation. I hope the latter is the case, as it would bode well for the trend of people living more balanced lives on-line and off-line.

Reasons for traffic decline in social networks:

Greater awareness of online privacy

Getting tired of “pokes” and meaningless messaging and are finding more useful things to do.

With the re-introduction to so many friends from primary and high school, people are now remembering the reasons they stopped talking to those people in the first place.

Just plain, getting bored with social networks.

Being stalked on-line.

What other reasons could there be?