Just read an interesting article on the "life" of the social network in The Big Money. My favorite part is this snippet about the teenage years of the Social Network.
The copycats emerge. (Age: 13-19; the aggressively competitive teenager)
With the first generation of social networks out of the way, a slew of copycats bubble up. Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Ning, etc. Convinced (and rightly so) that social networking is the future of the Web, these new sites all try to build upon fertile ground. It's a wild time, full of experimentation and competition for the most users and the flashiest tools. There's so much excitement that everybody ignores the history lesson on the tragedy of the commons.
