Where have all my facebook friends gone.....

...a long time parting?

As the old song noted, they go away. In London a few months ago Facebook was the Thing du Jour - or more accurately maybe du Monde, as all those groups that were set up so enthusiastically seem to have slowly declined in traffic, the amount of poking recedes, and the number of people who have "discovered" Facebook and gush to me about it dries up.

And then set this against the inexorable reported rise in Facebook traffic and valuation ($15bn and counting), and supposedly the increasing number of page hits per person, up from a fairly SocNet average c 600 pm in March to c 1,000 pm (reportedy) now.

So, whats going on? Possibilities are:

(i) I am out of the social loop - a virtual Johnny No Mates - very possible, though the Twitter, email and blog exchange traffic grows and grows. Its also notable that emails to Facebook friends take longer to get replies now than before.

(ii) People are still logging in frequently, just not communicating as much - maybe they are using all the exciting new tools to just peep at each other.

(iii) Actually, there never were many other people on Facebook, its just the staff peeping at you - as Valleywag notes, its a perk of the job:

What happens when you put twentysomethings in charge of a company with vast amounts of private information? Sheer madcap chaos, of course. Not to mention abuses of power. And that's what seems to be happening at Facebook. Valleywag kept hearing reports that Facebook employees had violated their users' privacy in a number of ways. The claimed abuses varied: Looking at restricted profiles to check out dates. Seeing which profiles a user had viewed. And, in one case, allegedly logging onto a user's account, changing her profile picture to a graphic image, and sending faked messages. Oh, and don't dare ask a Facebooker about any claims of misbehavior -- they'll report you to customer service for "harassment."

Or - shock horror - are we just seeing a replay of Second Life Syndrome, where in Autumn the PR juices rise strongly, hype springs anew from their (black clad) bosoms but it eventually becomes clear that the number of "users" is a very different number compared to those who actually use the system often.

Is Facebook the new "coffee table thing" for the NextGen - you have to have it on display, its a chip in the Game of Life, but you never actually read it?

I suspect its probably true of all SocNets - initially a high amount of activity to set it up, find all your friends, play with all the features - then activity for most people tails off as (i) the rest of your life's spinning plates need holding up and (ii) (dare we say this after a $15bn valuation) the new new shiny thing comes along to take your breath away.....