During the day; when my DSL provider wasn’t jacking around my connection, I noticed a number of posts surfacing that were heralding the decline and fall of social networks because the January numbers were down.
Then I saw Frederic’s post on his The Last Podcast blog where he states the obvious answer (thanks for the sanity Frederic) for why this decline is happening and wondering why all the negative hype over the stats. As he suggests in his post:
I don’t know who these analysts are, but maybe they should have a look at who the users of these sites are and what they tend to be doing in December. Every single social networking site sees a drop during December because college students are on vacation. Simple as that.
As I did in a comment to his post I would like to add the following reason for this decline. Anyone who has run a set of newsgroups, web forums or email mailing list will recognize the trend right off the bat. The fact is that any social online form of interaction will see a decline in activity during this time of the year. Just as you will see a decline as we get near the end of June.
What is going on is that people remember that they have a real life and that real life; regardless of how connected we might like to think we are, means going offline and living in the real world. While in January/February the reasons are different than say the period of June and July the fact is that these are trends that I have seen since the days of bulletin board services.
I realize that reality doesn’t make for good copy as the doom and gloom bullshit that is used to gain page views does but the numbers will always bounce back - it is just the other side of the cycle. So trying to read something into nothing makes as much sense as blaming this whole decline on Mother Nature and equally as stupid.
Conversation Tags: social networks, users, hype
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Actually, ANY business has circular yearly trends of activity. The summer months are good for IceCream and bad for VHS rental, while a cold and miserable winter night is perfect for a movie and a slice of pizza, but Ice Cream is usually the last thing you want. Anyone that doesn't understand this concept, has probably never worked in a job for more than a few months at a time.
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http://www.centernetworks.com/facebook-dip-seas...
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