There has been a 5% slowdown in new UK users to the larger social networks, Facebook and MySpace, between December 2007 and January this year.

Alex Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online which compiled the figures showing the decline, says: “The slow down in social networks is being somewhat exaggerated. It’s a natural form of any growth that we see in the online eco-system.

“Something starts from a very small base and grows very quickly. It becomes popular, but then it’s only natural at some point that the growth has to stop, because it cannot carry on growing at that rate, because there is only so many people it can grow into.” (Full BBC story)

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