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It's one thing when it appears that Facebook has lost numbers in Britain. Facebook wasn't alone. Social networking in general was down in that one country, where habits have never exactly been a mirror of the larger situation. Bebo, for example, is still relatively unknown in the States.

But follow-up numbers have people buzzing all the more. In the US, a plateau for Facebook, followed by a small January dip. Let the news of Facebook's death be exaggerated everywhere.

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(Photo Credit: Facebook)

The more prudent are reserving judgment. One month of fluctuation doesn't mean death or that the masses are losing interest or even finding new networks to be a part of. Those other networks are out there though, just waiting for the clusterfunk to divide into tribes like good humans*.

Or it might just mean that meteoric growth couldn't be sustained forever. And it won't be. MySpace over all is still growing, just not like it used to. It still dwarfs Facebook, the second most popular, and Facebook worldwide still has a strong pulse.

But it is a reminder about the nature of a "social" network. It's not like search, where one company builds a better robot than the other companies and thereby earns the market share until something better comes along, if it ever does. A social network has only as much sticking power as the local hot spot.

MySpace won its 109 million visitors via hype. The same goes for Facebook's 34 million visitors. Both are vulnerable to the next great thing, vulnerable to a band of ten-year-olds who will be old enough and interested enough one day to seek out social networks, vulnerable to the possibility their current members will engineer their own diaspora as they discover not only people with similar tastes and situations, but whole new worlds of social networks specifically designed for those tastes and situations.

So, don't read too much into what could be a seasonal fluctuation or what could have any number of explanations. But don't be too surprised either when the eventual diffusion occurs.

*This is not meant to imply any support of any type of segregation based on any characteristic or trait. It is only meant to reflect my (sarcastic and cynical) observation that humans are often naturally tribal, dividing themselves into "us" and "them," thereby creating territorial boundaries and rivalries. Kentuckians point and sneer at Ohioans and vice versa. In high school, my team was the Lions, and we had no love whatsoever for the Ashland Tomcats, who lived just 5 or 10 miles away, or their sissy mascot, or their citified ways. See, tribal. We probably exhibit the same behavior online. So would chimps, if we'd teach them how to use a mouse.