Agriya

I have started to notice a small, but significant change in the way I am surfing the internet. It’s been growing since summer 2007, but it’s only recently I realized that my surfing habits have changed. Talking with other people my age (I’m 25 by the way) reveal that I’m certainly not alone.

So what is it? How have my surfing habits changed?

The answer may come as quite a surprise, but I’ve found that I’m visiting Facebook.com less and less. What used to be a daily ritual (I was sad enough to check multiple times a day) was reduced to every other day, which in turn has reduced over time to maybe once a week.

But this is not a phenomenon restricted to just me, lots of people are using Facebook less and less, just check out this graph:

It shows, as a percentage of all sites on the internet, how many page views it gets per day. As you can clearly see, MySpace has been on the wane since July 2007. Facebook continued to grow, probably as it took users away from MySpace, but since December 2007 we can see page views have declined.

So what’s the reason for this? Are social networks losing their value?

I think not. The biggest turnoff for me when it came to Facebook is the multitude of useless applications that flooded people’s profiles, turning it from a clean elegant way to keep in touch to a constant battle to reject or ignore dozens of application requests each day.

In effect, with the addition of outside applications, Facebook turned in to everything I hated about MySpace. What’s next for Facebook? Glitter text? How cheesy and tacky can Facebook go without losing it’s original users who joined because they didn’t like the gaudiness of MySpace.

I know I’m not alone in this, infact, ReadWriteWeb interviewed someone who was one of the original users of Facebook and asked her opinions on where she thinks it’s going, this is what she had to say…

When they started to add new features like the wall, photo albums, video capabilities, and groups, people became more interested. But then Facebook took it too far. Now I find Facebook to be a suffocating bombardment of useless applications and features. I prefer an older version of just the basics - messaging, walls, photos and groups.

15 Questions For an Early Facebook User - 7th January 2008, ReadWriteWeb.com

So, does this make me homeless in terms of social networking? Certainly not, I will keep using Facebook, although my usage grows less and less each day.

What I am on the look out for is a social network site that can offer the sophistication and decorum that Facebook offered in 2006, before they tried to go mainstream and convert the MySpace weenies.

Can you make a better Facebook using similar software? Check out our range of social networking scripts starting at $399 and make a better job than Facebook and MySpace!

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Imagine being given a cheque for $850m. Seriously, think about it for a second. The interest alone would net you a cool $29,750,000 every year in the US. Not sure about you, but I think that’s a serious chunk of change.

Let’s take another figure, say $225m. OK, given the choice between $850m and $225m it’s obvious which one you’d take, but forgive me if I bite the hand off the person who offers me $225m for my website.

So, what on Earth am I talking about here? Believe it or not, these are the latest figures for corporate take overs of Bebo and Digg respectively.

Bebo is a large social networking site that claims to have over 40m users worldwide. It is the 3rd largest social network after MySpace and Facebook (both of which were bought for $580m and $280m).

But large buyouts of this kind are not confined to the big players, in 2007 a facebook clone (literally down to the last detail!) called Studivz was bought out by a single investor for $132m. The unique thing about Studivz was that it was aimed at a niche (albeit a fairly broad niche). The niche was a social network for German speaking people.

So, like Studivz, how can you jump on this bandwagon of massive buyouts (and lets face it, I think we’d all be quite happy with a paltry $10m)? First off, target a niche - whether it be by country, region, language, interest, cause or whatever. The days of being able to start large generic social networks are over. It is the time of the niche social network.

Define your niche properly before you start, and you too could get a knock at your door with someone trying to offer you millions for your little piece of the web.

Interested in finding out how you can set up your own turnkey social networking software? Want to run a face like YouTube? Think you can make a better job of Facebook (let’s be honest, with the countless thousands of ‘apps’ now available, it’s becoming more like MySpace everyday)?

Come and check out Agriya’s Social Networking software, with turnkey prices starting at just $399.

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Agriya has recently launched some brand new software that lets you run your own site like Yahoo Answers - but far from just being a Yahoo Answers clone, it gives you a significant advantage over the established sites…

Drawing on our experience with Rayzz and video sharing, we saw a huge gap in the market for an Answers type website but with a significant twist…

As well as being able to post plain text questions and answers, we have given users the ability to ask and reply to questions with video and audio!

What’s more, your users don’t even need to have any special software on their computer to record and upload the audio/video as it’s all done directly from the site - cool or what?

Find out more Anova - Making Knowledge Fun!

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