Recently Facebook reached over 140 million registered users and with that I have been following a traffic analysis to see how Facebook is doing versus the legendary MySpace when it came to traffic and I asked myself why Facebook is growing so rapidly.

As we can see from the graph below toward the end of January 2009 Facebook will become the most popular social networking website on the internet.

I think this is primarily due to the fact that Facebook is grabbing all of the ‘MySpace graduates’.

Social Networking is all about the demographic and what that demographic does with the tools it has from a social networking standpoint.

I have seen this before from personal experience when I founded a small niche social ‘community’ back in 2003 it grow tremendously (for the niche) for a couple of years.  When MySpace came around it grabbed 80% of the audience from my small community website (currently over 30,000 members). Now Facebook has been growing because users of MySpace are ‘graduating’ from MySpace and moving on to the social networking community that the rest of their peers are utilizing.

Ask anyone who is in college if they use MySpace. More than likely their response will be that MySpace is for ‘kids’ or high schoolers.

Next Social Network Graduate?

My question is what or who will be the next social networking website that will draw in the graduates of ‘Facebook’?

As we can see from the visual to the left, social networking utilization is primarily for communication and conversation followed by multimedia activites such as music, video, and photos.

The lesser percentages is that of actual ‘contributors’ or ‘creators’ of content.

I wonder if social networking websites such as LinkedIn.com or even Tagged.com will become that next step for graduates of Facebook.com?

Or perhaps users will become so overwhelmed by marketers and advertising on Facebook that they decide to leverage the micro-blogging genre such as Twitter.com or Plurk.com?

My thought for a successful social networking website is one that will be a merger between P2P and a Microblog. Based on statistics known in visual. There is a need for such a service that will provide multimedia content without a user having to contribute or create the content themselves and at the same time be able to add their own photos and be given the opportunity to have conversations with those that they gauge as their most valuable ‘friends’.

Could a service like this pull the next graduate class from Facebook?

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