Facebook

[monk222]

When I saw the news that Facebook's traffic has declined, I started smiling, but then I resumed frowning when I read Farhad Manjoo's explanation:

If it's not privacy and it's not a new rival, why is Facebook losing customers in America? Because there's no one left to go after. As Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon points out, Facebook's growth always stalls when it hits 50 percent market penetration within a country. Facebook is now experiencing something unprecedented in the short history of social networking—it has captured every plausible user in several countries, and the only people who are left are folks without Internet access, people who do have access but don't spend a lot of leisure time online, and the few lonely die-hards who swear they'll never join the site no matter how many times I exhort them to do so.

I don't know what you can do better on Facebook than you can do on LiveJournal. I can only suppose that LJ became defined by its dominant clientele of high school and college students, and Facebook just effectively marketed itself to the mainstream population and then sucked up everyone. Whatever.