Are the mavens deserting Facebook?

In Malcolm Gladwell's book "Tipping Point", the mavens are the early adopters, the people who influence the masses to adopt the New New thing by being early finders and experts on it, helping to cross that Chasm (to mix metagurus ) by increasing one's familiarity with it. Likewise, Connectors are the central nodes that broadcast awareness of the New New thing by being very connected to others.

Now something that has fascinated me over the last few weeks is the number of both of these sort of people who I read / follow / friend etc who are saying they are giving up Facebook, or taking a (long) holiday from it anyway.

I am especially fascinated by the number of people on Twitter who say they are dropping out of Facebook (Twitterers are very interesting as they are - imho - a fairly concentrated collection of such people.

Now, a few twitters does not a summer make, but I think this is an early warning signal that Facebook's Halcyon days are over. And maybe with such bellweather comes dotcom Crash 2.0

Whether it matters now is, as they say, another matter, as Mike Butcher notes, Which? magazine today voted Facebook as being superb at security. Clearly what geeks and grockles look for are different things. However, the 2 year average lifespan of the New New Socnet does imply that Facebook's reign as the Shiny One is drawing to a close.

What I do also expect therefore is for something else to take its place as the New Shiny Media...my money for the short term is on Twitter, merely because I note the number of people who have taken it up again after playing with it earlier this year and then leaving it be.

By the way I'm one of these people, and I am usually damn rude about Twitter - just search for "Twitter" on this blog - but I was challenged by a friend who said stop w(h)ining about the River of Drivel ( aka the Ambient Idiocy ) and find a way to increase the Signal to Noise ratio on Twitter using our Zeitgeist / Memetic Engine technology - Scoble being the acid test