Whilst Facebook Grabs No. 1, Perfspot Nudges Into View

Interesting to see that the social network frenzy continues unabated. So, Facebook finally grabs the UK's No. 1 social media slot from Myspace. Techcrunch UK cites a report from Neilsen//NetRatings report showing a 541% growth since Dec 2006.

Everyone's favourite of yesteryear, poor old Myspace, grew only 20% in the same period, Dec 2006 to Sep 2007. Only 20%. Crikey, back in pre-Internet days, that would've been a pretty healthy growth rate.

Still, Facebook's not the fastest growing social network amongst UK users. That honour goes to newcomer Perfspot with a whopping 756% growth rate. Although without any user numbers this could just be a jump from 10 to 10,000 users. Nope, I've not heard of them either. I guess this'll change.

I wonder when the attrition of moving between the social networks will wear down the surge of people from one network to the other. Or perhaps, some of the tools being developed to manage personal info across networks will come out of stealth and solve the headache of profile data sprinkled across multiple locations.

It occurs that this may lead to a cycle of infidelity amongst social networkers. How's this for a hypothesis:

• Users get fed up of maintaining info across lots of networks with similar profile(s), tools, content types so they use tools to make this task easier.
• The social networks are pressured to provide access for these management tools to attract users to their networks.
• The importance of being a member of a single network is diminished by the ease of managing personal info across networks.

Clearly, some more thought is required and I reserver the right to change my mind tomorrow when I've thought about this some more. Early, early days though.