My name is Martin. And I use Facebook.

It had to happen. In the end I crumbled like a cheapbiscuit. I'd grown tired of the endless urging and prodding from friends, familyand co-workers alike.

But now my sad and pathetic pre-Facebook era is over. I am aman reborn in a brave new world with a bright future. Only thing is... Facebookis dying. It must be - I'm on it.

Don't get me wrong. I haven't stayed away because of ignoranceor unfamiliarity with the social networking phenomenon. I'm just one of thosepeople who likes to keep my private life just that.

So why is Facebook now doomed? Because of people like me,who are signing up for the same reasons as me by their thousands every week.

And just like me, they'll half-heartedly maintain theirprofile, administering the odd weary poke and making the occasionalindifferent scribble on a wall or two, then fade into ambivalent silence.

Facebook honey

Because of the numbers, Facebook will increasingly be likehoney to the swarming third-party add-on bees (something many Facebookveterans are already complaining about).

The end result will be another over-commercialised MySpace -where half the registered users don't bother keeping their page up to date, andthe other half start getting frustrated by just how much time it takes to doit.

And then there will be a fresh hot social networking craze, and we'll all move on.

The concept is hardly a new one. I remember signing up tosocial networking site SixDegrees.com in the late 90s. It was based on thewell-known premise that everyone in the world can be connected together by six degreesof separation. The notion is valid if everyone in the world knows an average ofabout 42 other people each.

Fair enough, but the trick was getting all 42 to sign up toSixDegrees. Those pesky developing countries didn't do their bit, and the wholething fell apart.

In those days, there was a genuine fascination with thepotential of being six short steps apart from anyone else on the planet. Theproblem was that the numbers and the technology just weren't there to make ithappen, and the site folded.

Now, the opposite is true. All the tools are there, andthere are fantastic and useful elements in every social networking site outthere, some of which have been around since the time of SixDegrees.

The problem is we're not looking to build a community forcommunity's sake. We're just biding our time waiting for the next big hit.

We don't need a new social networking phenomenon. We need toreturn to the spirit of SixDegrees.

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