So, according to Nielson Netratings, Facebook’s domination of the Internet might be on the slide. Between December 2007 and January 2008, there was a 5% fall in visitor numbers - MySpace and Bebo have suffered similar drops in traffic. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not.

The sensible explanation here would seem to be that most websites suffer a drop in traffic over Christmas, particularly ones that people access from work. Because at Christmas, people have more interesting things to do. Another factor is almost certainly the fact that many offices have blocked access to social networking sites, so employees can’t access these sites during working hours. That’ll kill a lot of traffic to time-wasting websites. And the thing with websites like Facebook is that if you can’t access it regularly, there’s not an awful lot of point: the fun of it is watching things change, reading your friends’ status updates in real time, and writing messages on their walls about them. If you don’t check it for a few days, you’ll probably find that when you do come back, there’s not a lot to catch up on - conversations you might have had now won’t happen, because the moment’s passed. A lot of concerns have been raised recently about whether or not people should share any information online at all, due to fears of identity theft, and that, too, might have negatively affected Facebook’s traffic.

But I don’t think that MySpace, Facebook et al are going to be shutting up shop any time soon. It was probably naive to think that the all-consuming popularity of social networking was going to continue forever, because the zeitgeist almost moves on, often for no discernible reason. Dozens of social networking sites have already fallen by the wayside - who uses Friendster any more, or even, if we’re honest, MySpace? Something else will, almost inevitably, rise up to take the place of Facebook: