Social Media usage trends

Two articles have come up today that are interesting if a little contradictory.

The first posted on MacWorld but clipped from ComputerWorld is titled "Are we burning out on Facebook?"

Could it be that Americans are starting to grow a bit weary of Facebook, which has captivated our attention and much of our free time?That just might be the case, according to numbers released by Inside Facebook, a site that tracks its usage. The site reported last week that the Facebook’s growth dropped dramatically between May and June. This follows news in March that Facebook replaced Google as the most visited Web site in the U.S. for a full week. Facebook only picked up 320,800 new users in the U.S. in June, Inside Facebook reported. That might sound like a lot until you compare it with the number of new U.S. users the site grabbed in May: 7.8 million. The tracking site also noted that fewer current users in Facebook’s prime age category of 18 to 44 were active on the site last month, though it didn’t offer any specific numbers.

There is some debate as to whether Facebook's privacy issues might be having an effect on usage.

The second article is another one form the pen of Jemima Kiss at The Guardian. Entitled "Waging war on Wordpress: Posterous prepares the switch" Jemima writes...

Twitter has played a significant role in the demise of 'full' blogging, not because it replaced the medium but more that it claimed people's web time and pushed the focus of web publishing towards real time. Facebook, too, is a famous online time sink. But sites like Posterous and Tumblr have refined blogging by streamlining the posting process, stripping out many of the bulky features and offering slicker, more real-time features and designs. 
What's the attraction? A less bloated back end (there's pills for that) without multiple features you never use. An end to the barrage of spam comments that plague Wordpress - Posterous is free of those, for now. And a service designed to be so email-post friendly that you never even need to login at your desktop; I post everything to my trial Posterous blog from my phone. Photos, videos, text docs, even spreadsheets - if you can email it, you can blog it from your phone. I'm converted.

It is interesting that at last people are considering the time all this social networking takes and the desire for a simple interface as well as tools to make multi-platform posting easier appear to be coming to the fore.