The Decline and Fall of Social Media - a bit early to cry wolf?

It would seem that the social networks are all seeing declining average usage per user....now, we predicted this would happen to Facebook (see here) as the empirical evidence we have suggests this is occurring to them, and Twitter is picking up the customers.

Any one person's time on a social network starts off with extremely high activity levels as they play with the service, find friends etc etc - but over time they use it less often, there are a few % who stay "superusers", but on average usage declines to a steady trickle.

Facebook has been at high growth, but our analysis suggests at about the time of Beacon its new growth rate was slowing, and that means c 3 months out the average time per user starts to collapse as all the large "boom generation" of users starts to reduce their activity. So Facebook I can understand.

But I am surprised by all of them losing market share together though, as they are at different lifestages.

More established networks like MySpace are quite mature, they have their schtick and its more stably sticky, so I wouldn't expect it to move in synch with Facebook.

One explanation is that everyone is bored with social networks, as The Register suggests (and everyone has a new year resolution to give them up), but another is its a seasonal effect, so I think its a bit early to call doom on the whole industry.