[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Chris Williams from The Register has penned a fairly critical piece about the state of social networking, based on some recent data from comScore that shows user engagement (the amount of time people spend on a site) falling at a number of leading sites including MySpace and Bebo. While the numbers are pretty grim for some sites, it should be noted that November and December are typically slow due to the holidays, and some networks such as Facebook and hi5 actually showed user engagement growth year-over-year.
The article is also laced with bubble talk, as Williams quotes Ted Dzuiba of Uncov, “I remember a time, long long ago, when tech companies spent their own venture capital on each other, so revenues were all booked from the same small pool of money. Yeah, as I recall, it didn't end well,” alluding of course to the tech bubble of the late 90s.
In any event, today’s poll, to our highly unbiased audience of social networking aficionados, web startups, and VCs who back such companies:
{democracy:78}