early signs of "facebook fatigue"

British internet users are falling out of love with Facebook and the social-networking site has shed 400,000 visitors between December and January, the website's first decline in users, the Guardian writes. According to Alex Burmaster internet analyst of Nielsen Online this year we are likely to see a plateauing of social networking.

Despite the dip, Facebook remains the UK's most popular social-networking site with 8.5 million unique users at the end of January, according to Nielsen Online, down from 8.9 million in December. During the previous 12 month period Facebook sprung from 1.1 million users to 8.9 million highlighting how fast it caught on.

Facebook's nearest rival, MySpace, saw UK traffic drop 5% between December and January. It had 5 million unique users in January. Third-placed Bebo saw its users decline a more modest 2% month on month with 4.1 million users. Together the three networking sites attracted a combined figure of a whopping 21.6 million UK users! From a PR perspective this is a crowd that deserves to be monitored to some extent.

But has the balloon burst? Burmaster claims users are beginning to suffer from “Facebook fatigue” and maintains the aura has worn off a bit. According to the Guardian “there’s a growing sense in the online world that the hype around the company, founded by Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg, has been overdone and the honeymoon is over.”