Advertisers, meanwhile, are rushing into a deteriorating medium. Eight years ago, Facebook offered a tightly defined audience of American 18- to 22-year-olds. Now, the user base has become such a melting pot that in order for the company to run a targeted ad business, it must turn to big data: leveraging the personal information that users entrusted to it, and even the information they didnt. The New York Times reports that Facebook has partnered with outside firms -- digital detective agencies -- in an attempt to accumulate even more data on its users. This cant be expected to improve customer loyalty at a time when commercial content is displacing an increasing amount of the social content in Facebooks news feed.

The social network has evolved into a gaming platform, an Internet-meme echo chamber, a professional network, a dating service (it may have always been that), a public identity for Web users, and finally, a billboard for advertisers -- anything and everything that might increase the number of accounts or create new ways to monetize them. This growth has pleased investors at the expense of customers; a Pew study found that more than half of current users have, at some point, taken a break from Facebook. Maybe they got tired of untagging photos and declining friend requests from strangers, or perhaps they no longer had time to read about the life drama of every person theyd ever met. Regardless, 34% of them claimed they were spending less time on the social network versus a year ago, while only 13% said more.

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Either way, the large networks are doing a poor job of monetizing. Facebook has done a better job than anyone at creating a revenue stream, and with a billion users the network only managed $5 billion in revenue for 2012. Wall Street might see this as untapped potential Facebooks $60 billion market cap presupposes a healthy growth rate but the companys plan to tap it is, at best, a work in progress, and it isnt clear how customers will respond to an increased ad presence, when indications so r are that social media advertising is both mistrusted by consumers and less effective than spam as a marketing platform.

The companys incredible growth, which is usually interpreted as success, may have blinded us to the possibility that smaller can be better. They may not help us find a childhood friend, but little networks like Path and FamilyLeaf can offer a more genuinely social experience. Meanwhile, themed social media provide a more natural, less intrusive environment for advertisers. Goodreads -- just acquired by Amazon -- is a social network framed around reading, with some 16 million members. Fitocracy offers a similar environment for those trying to get into shape. Ads on these platforms are guaranteed to reach a community with a shared interest, and more importantly, a certain degree of motivation.

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Momentum carried the website forward as it was opened first to high-school students, and then by 2006, to everyone. Bar room jokes and last nights photos gave way to mily pictures and benign status updates. Facebook was maturing, and while that wasnt necessarily a bad thing -- the user base was also growing up -- it was still a change, and as it turns out, only the first of many.

Meanwhile, according to Techcrunch,new york asian escort model Twitter isnt yet cash flow positive, much less profitable. MySpace proved to be a six-year headache for News Corp. These are (or were) industry leaders, full-grown companies with mature user bases andSocial networks Building empires not businesses? Social Networking a heavy ad presence. Only in tech would investors be willing to tolerate such a fetal adulthood, or wait patiently while global brands stumble towards a business plan -- that is, a plan for money and not simply growing at a loss. In any event, Wall Street likes social media; the question now is whether consumers, ced with more ads and more burnout, will continue to feel the same way.

The greatest threat to Facebook may not be that users will abandon it for a large competitor, but that theyll simply spend less time on it in vor of smaller, focused networks that most people have never heard of -- and that advertisers will do the same thing.

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At first, Facebooks growth was organic. In 2004 the social networking website expanded to universities across the US, quickly saturating its target market: college students. I was one at the time, and

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At first, Facebooks growth was organic. In 2004, the social networking website expanded to universities across the US, quickly saturating its target market: college students. I was one at the time, and remember clearly that what made it so addictive, and so sure of early success, was the complete absence of parents, public figures, professors -- anyone in a position of authority, and everyone whose judgment we cared about. College life is the ultimate inside joke; it not only lls flat, but becomes embarrassing (or worse) when told to the wrong person. Facebook caught on because there was never any doubt about which social network we were dealing with.