The Washington Post writes today (man, they’ve had some great articles recently) about how MySpace may be losing its cachet amongst its core audience:

MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month .

There’s some interesting discussion about it as well. But in spite of the title of the article “In Teens Web World, MySpace is So Last Year”, the most fascinating part of the article isn’t MySpace. Its how it talks about how most social networks haven’t lasted; how one begets another, which begets yet another.

It makes sense in a fashion, as a commentary of a youthful audience always in search of what’s the next Biggest Thing, and in the search of what’s cool. Sure, the author makes some excellent points about how there are fairly concrete things that turn people off MySpace — the monitoring, the stalking, the strange friend requests, the spamming and so on. And certainly, there was a nice article on the logistical failures of Friendster.

But at the end of the day, what keeps the tastemakers going is what’s in search of the that next big thing. And when they move, they’ll take the rest of their “friends”, “faces”, “spaces” or contacts with them.

And sites like MySpace will only exist until that thing comes along.

I certainly agree with Cynthia from IP Democracy on this one — perhaps the real lesson is that social networks, like other constructs of what’s hip and fashionable amongst youth, may never last — and should never be built to last.
But what’s the lesson for large media companies? 

I guess the corollary is if social networking sites never last, then it makes no sense to buy it at the height of its popularity; which, with the goggles of hindsight, one wonders if that’s what Fox has done.

Similarly, if its hard to tell when a site has really hit its zenith.

And if that’s true, perhaps the lesson for VC’s and large media companies who want to tap pools and networks of individuals is to either try and purchase them at an early stage — spread the wealth by investing in networks discretely when they’re small (they’ll be cheap too); or, if the cost is minimal, try and create networks on your own.

Of course, this will also have to be done discretely. There’s nothing lamer and teh suck than joining a network owned by General Electric (or Fox, by that example), which perhaps is more a lesson in social network “branding” than anything else; but if a company is willing to spend $500 million dollars for the future, perhaps spending one tenth of that on purchasing “growth” sites, or rolling your own makes sense.

It could be the schadenfreude talking, but with the context of web2.0 ‘history’ its hard to see how spending $500 million in a single matured social network site does make any sense — at all.