Recently there seems to be a growing movement against some of the more popular social networks, evidenced by several amusing videos and a reasonably coherent rant from cranky geek John C. Dvorak.

Dvorak's article should be framed by the fact that he is at least one generation too old to be interacting with social networks in the way most people do, and primarily uses them as a self promotion tool (witness his recent conversion to Twitter). However he does hit on one important point - that we have seen several waves of social networking booms and busts and another one is long overdue.

My first piece of video evidence makes a similar point, and neatly ties Dvorak's article to the themes of the other two.

Video two focuses on the fact that Facebook's core audience of ADD-inflicted youths are beginning to tire of the site as it increasingly fails to offer anything new. Despite the torrent of applications that we have been able to add to our profiles, they are all really doing the same thing. In other words, although Facebook is constantly changing, its primarily Gen-Y users also require the change to be changing for their interest to be maintained.

The final video, from UK sketch comedy team Idiots of Ants, expresses unease with the lack of synchronisation between real life relationships and those formed on social networking sites. It seems that people are starting to think that one of social networking's greatest stengths - the ability to maintain friendships with second-tier contacts or even strangers - is also its greatest weakness, and are becoming concerned about their online reputations.

I don't see a big revolution coming any time soon, but for me the next evolutionary step would be from closed social networks like Facebook to personal content aggregation servicers like Plaxo. This would eliminate some of the more annoying applications (Facebook) and brain-melting layouts (MySpace), focusing on real content like flickr albums, yelp reviews and blog posts by drawing in feeds from specialist sites designed for one specific purpose. Additionally I think we are going to see tighter integration of friend classifications and privacy settings.

Neither of these trends would address the core issue that users are just bored of it all. If this really is as much of a a problem as these videos seem to suggest, we might see the rise of a highly simplified service like Twitter or watch the whole thing collapse back to the dark ages of email.

In fact there is probably a small group of teenagers in Silicon Valley who have already figured it out.

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