Have kids lost interest in MySpace?

One doesn't really have to consult an oracle to predict that as soon as MySpace became mainstream, teens would start to figure it as uncool. That's the consensus among some teens, reports the Washington Post.

"I think it's definitely going down - a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now," said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.

Could MySpace be a flash-in-the pan? Within 2 1/2 years, MySpace has gone from relative obscurity to a major Web sensation that News Corp. bought for $580 million, and then Google Inc. spent $900 million as a primary venue of advertisements.

Tracking the site's popularity over time by measuring how long a user stays at a the site shows that MySpace is on a gradual decline. The fickleness of the online teen audience makes for risky business acquisitions.

"They're not loyal," Ben Bajarin, a market analyst for Creative Strategies Inc., said of the youth demographic.

Of course News Corp. wants MySpace to be a indispensable site for the youth culture.

"There will always be anecdotes of people that love MySpace and people that don't," a spokeswoman for the site said, but the site is adding an average of 320,000 new profiles every day and continuing to go mainstream. In the past year it launched new services such as mobile and video channels, and expanded internationally.