Big winners on the net can soon find themselves flailing and trailing
Tales of "Facebook fatigue" are probably over-hyped as the top social networking site reveals slowing international growth rates and 100,000 Britons signing off forever in the last couple of months. And Daily Mail predictions of a "Myspace-style sputter into oblivion" may also be prudently filed on a back shelf somewhere. But there is, nonetheless, something hauntingly impermanent about success on the web of dreams.
Last week the New York Times was brooding editorially on the record of Microsoft, a big winner from a decade ago now trailing and flailing far behind Apple. Two or three wrong decisions and you're toast. Will there be an AOL in five years if its takeover of the Huffington Post fails to flourish? Can there, indeed, be a HuffPost without Huff?
The questions are difficult, insistent ? and ones that newspapers on the internet (such as the record-breaking Mail itself) need to take on board. Print newspapers, because of their structure, catchment areas and sheer physicality, don't oscillate wildly from month to month or year to year. They grow or shrink relatively gradually. They take a long time to die.
But that isn't the nature of life or death on the internet. There, loyalties soar and flake in an instant. One minute celebrity sites like Perez Hilton and TMZ are kings, the next their crowns are sent spinning by Mail Online. And next year? Surely more startups, more competition, more wonders rated at $10bn, more heroes slithering to zero. Plus more forgetfulness and dashed hopes as fatigue and sputter take their inevitable revenge. And it could all be (you might decide to tweet, whilst Twitter lasts) in the nature of the beast.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/19/facebook-fatigue-peter-preston-comment
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