Not Sure I Agree with Om

In a post called "Social Media Gets a Sanity Check," Om Malil comes down on social network sites as having run their course, citing plateauing user numbers, I'm sure Comscore is right about that, because most of my early adopter buddies have finished with Facebook and MySpace, and I can't even stand to visit my own MySpace page, much less anyone else's.

But I don't think this is the end of social media, I think it's an evolution. That's where I agree with Om. Social networks are evolving, with people going to smaller networks or distributed networks..

I think the "conversation," as we social media people are fond of calling it, is decentralizing and finding itself. Although Om cites Dogster as an example of that, I joined Dogster, but I don't hang our there either. I hang out on Twitter, Seesmic, and Friendfeed, where my friends are. We all tend to go where our friends are.

But judging from the fact that I keep getting friended by former classmates and old friends that are just discovering Facebook, I think people (especially older ones) are still signing up, even as people like me take their attention (if not their profiles and log-ins) elsewhere.

The big sites are churning users. As a social media newbie, you start with MySpace and Facebook, and then move on to something smaller and more manageable. But MySpace and Facebook still have their places as Social Media 101 tools for a long time to come. They're gonna have to adjust their overhead --as any ongoing business does--to reflect their maturing business models. Advertisers are going to have to crank in a different demographic of users in their media buys. But they won't go away any time soon.