So Who Will Dethrone Facebook?

Who are the pretenders to the Facebook throne?

It seems a strange question to ask when Facebook is at the top of its game, but the same used to be said for MySpace and look where it is heading.

As this chart shows, Mr Murdoch's investment is still on the slippery slope to social oblivion.

Ning is one of the more popular alternative platforms but even it has struggled to be a commercial success and has from July will embrace a different business model; the free version disappearing in a puff of smoke.

This has seen the use of Ning go into decline, dropping nearly 5% since the intial announcement, as site owners scramble for alternatives (chart below)

So who might take over?  Here are some of the platforms that are being touted by the pundits.

OneSocialWeb has the backing of Vodaphone and their vision is a series of interconnected platforms thereby creating a bigger social web.



The Appleseed project aimes to " create an open source, fully distributed and decentralized social networking software"

And then of course there is the next Big Thing from Google............?

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