Social networking will continue to grow in 2009, but expect a social networking backlash to start.
After all, with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, how many ways do we need to connect to the same people?
We’re feeling social networking fatigue (SNF) based on getting contacts on two different sites from someone we don’t know.
Meanwhile, the challenge for some sites, like Twitter and Plaxo, is that they have yet to monetize their communities, user base, etc.
How long can Twitter survive without generating a revenue stream? The backlash will also affect sites designed to help with lead generation but contain wrong information. There are a number of such sites like Spoke.com, Lead411, JigSaw.com. Spoke.com included a number of people as Birnbach employees who actually work at an acquired client of ours; that’s the most egregious, but most of these sites contain misinformation. (Since they’re for lead gen, we have not corrected most of the mistakes we’ve found.)