Social Machinery

Digital fashion come and goes and in some cases generates a great social phenomenon which soon disappears as if they never existed. Although nowadays everyone is shocked about social networking exponential growth and relevance in our daily life, it is also interesting to analyze the latest data on active accounts. This data confirms that social networks are still on a bullish period; living a golden age, even do tough times come ahead.

Despite the increase on number of subscribers social networks have experienced in the last year, studies confirm that 45% of all accounts eventually falling into disuse after a few months after its activation. The causes vary according to each case, but the competition between services, Facebook, twitter, Myspace and now Google with Buzz-makes users leave their accounts in networks for other minority. This is the case, for example, Hi5, Fotolog or even MySpace.

 For instance, according to a study by RJMetrics Inc., many Twitter users aren’t tweeting on a regular basis. The study found that Twitter only has 10 to 15 million active users and only 17% of the 75M registered Twitter accounts were updated this month.

“When you look at new account registrations, no one can deny that Twitter is still growing like a rocket ship. That’s good,” wrote Robert J. Moore, CEO and founder of RJMetrics. “However, upon closer inspection, the rate of new user sign-ups has dropped meaningfully from its peak and many new users never do anything with their accounts. That’s bad. Furthermore, the percentage of accounts sending out tweets has steadily declined over the past six months. That’s worse.” 

Digital cemeteries is not something new, many email service providers have had to disable accounts mainly because they  detected that its servers had become real cemeteries, with inactive accounts for months. Probably Twitter’s case is the most complex one. According to RJ Metrics report about 25% of users have no followers at all and roughly 40% of users only have 1 to 5 followers.