The Rise & Fall Of Online Empires [Infographic]

The social media landscape is an ever changing ecosystem that doesn’t really bend with the creativity of its founders. It is all up to the users these days, and that pretty much determines whether a service is going to last or fall into the shadows of a new, more interesting, social media site. To try and understand why a site falls victim to a loss of users can sometimes be difficult to assess; however, there are always tell tale signs that something just isn’t working as it should. We have seen many examples of this, and some are of course MySpace and Digg, who seem to be struggling to keep their users at the moment. These are not the only ones who have succeeded on the Internet only to fall apart by their own creativeness.

It’s easy to start wondering if Twitter and Facebook will at some point meet the same demise. I have a hard time seeing Facebook decline from their throne anytime soon with their mammoth number of users and their constant increase in popularity and influence. The infographic published by CenturyLink showcases their continued increase in popularity as well as plots down the timeline for some of the Internet’s most successful ventures that somehow managed to fall.

This infographic clearly outlines the rise and fall of some of the social media sites that we have found exponentially useful at some point, but they were overtaken by the new social networking sites that increased productivity and interaction, which seems to be what people are looking for. Pinterest, on the other hand, is a little bit less complex. This social networking site does things a little bit differently than everyone else, which I think is the key to their huge success. If anything, this infographic could teach us a thing or two about user influence and also that creativity isn’t always the way to getting more users. The way that a user has learned the interface and structure of their preferred social networking site gets compromised when a new UI is introduced, which could increase the time a user has to spend on the site. That’s time that the user has tried to eliminate by learning the previous interface and streamlining their interaction with it. Maybe that is something to think about for future social networking sites.