PSILOG

Nielsen/NetRatings has issued a study showing that the top 10 social networking sites saw traffic grow 47% over the last year, with MySpace (367% increase) and MSN Spaces (286%) seeing the biggest growth. And these are only the internal growth figures. What about the number of social networking sites available today? The offering appears to be growing exponentially as well (though no hard data is to be found, yet).

It seems a bit like the situation we had in the 90ies where everybody created their own homepage (remember Geocities? - for which Yahoo! paid way too much money) hooked up to some networking tool like Webring. In the end it became impossible to figure out who did what where and when, with tremendous clutter as a result. Are we heading the same way? It seems so: there are the social networking sites, the virtual environments like Second Life, Habbo, Taatu..., the gaming environments and the chatting environments, all competing for a piece of the Web 2.0 cake.

How long will it take until we see new companies (like Google, Yahoo!...) arise that start aggregating these social networking environments and allow people to manage their identity or identies across different platforms without having to go through the trouble of surfing, logging in, connecting and reconnecting and reconnecting and...

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