Yesterday was international delete your MySpace account day. And after a number of high profile articles talking about not being able to get rid of their accounts this is just another nail in the coffin that is MySpace. Looking at the user figures on Alexa.com MySpace still has the most reach of all the top tier social networking sites but as any business manager will tell you the most important metric is ground year on year – and the MySpace grown is very much slowing down.

There has been endless press about Facebook towards the back end of last year plateauing in news of the Beacon advertising system. Now in the UK we didn’t get that much coverage of the Mark Zuckerberg’s defence of that system – but even without that people were starting to see the cracks in the veneer, users are increasing becoming tired of the myriad of third party applications, the lack of privacy – not with each other but with the company, and the ease in which individuals can stripe anonymity out of their lives (employing search Facebook profiles).

Bite PR won the lucrative Facebook UK tender in Nov 07 and they really have their work cut out if they plan to keep the same take up of Facebook as the company have come accustomed to. They will never be able improve on previous Facebook publicity they will only be able to sustain. I believe the big question of the coming year is, “how is Facebook going to play nice with the rest of the web”. Facebook comes across as somewhat of an outsider; they were first the underdog to MySpace and then they starting building steam and people were getting involved in Facebook whilst keeping the affair going with MySpace and then, in what it seemed like was overnight, Facebook launched a platform and suddenly everyone without a Facebook profile was on the outside looking in. As a company you had to have a Facebook app because that was the best way of interacting with your audience, and you were writing this app using a language and a system setup by the underdog – it’s a great story. Now the future has to be interaction through a number of sources, it is going to be the launch of the personal brand – all your information and interactions can be stored in one place and under one roof. I in-vision a time when the user will be picking which application they want to use to group all there interaction on a website that they control, some people might pay for a ad free application, and some will be more than happy to get the free ad filled version. In my opinion the future of the web lies in the hands of the people who can give users an online WYSIWYG control panel to create the look of their brand. From that website the user can plug an application in which joins everything they are doing on the likes of Facebook and Gmail in a moment.

So is this the end of social networking? The simple answer is no. Social networking is both innovative and valuable, and now that it’s here it’s not going away again. But social networking will change and evolve – there will be new contenders in the marketplace doing new and different things and there will be the heavyweights who will jiggle and shovel and, as MySpace has proven, as long as you can keep most of the friends, most of the people will keep coming back.