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At this point it might be worth referring to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”, which includes this point:

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” Robin Dunbar

So what’s the optimum number of people on a social network?

On privacy: I do find peoples naivety a bit concerning – the people who’ve put lots of information on about themselves are presumably regular users – surely they’ve noticed just how much they can see about other people – don’t they realise it applies to themselves as well?

I don’t know if it was just good timing, coinciding with web 2.0 and the spread of broadband, but it seems to me Facebook is now a contender for ‘Fifth horseman of the internet’. (I first heard this rather dubious phrase coined by someone on a BBC business roundup a few days ago – claiming that the *four* horsemen of the internet were Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay (as opposed to terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and drugs, presumably).

Anyway I don’t think you can write an obituary for Facebook just yet, but perhaps, for the reasons you cite, we’ve almost reached the point where everyone who’s ever likely to be on it has signed up, and the others have stepped away from the computer to get on with their lives.