In the UK, many parents who belong to the early adopters or credible mass market demographic, discovered facebook before their kids. The younger kids were still on MSN and Bebo while the teens were using Bebo and Myspace.

My 16 yearold daughter started using facebook about a year ago and states that she aswell as her friends now only use facebook.

Youth culture is constantly re-inventing itself. The youth market are fickle and will continue to be nomadic in their social networking sites.

Their loyalty lasts until the next network arrives, and I feel the lack of space ownership (ie Kids, in the main, don’t want to hang out with their parents) and difficulties in maintaining the privacy you want without offending people you know but don’t want to network with, can only speed up the imminent exodus to the next emerging network.

I have my kids as contacts, which at the beginning was a nice idea, however, a recent fallout over a tongue piercing that I had said no to, and my subsequent discovery, through a cryptic status that came up on my home page, that my daughter had got it done on the sly, led to an escalation of issues. In particular, my daughters belief that I was snooping through her profile, led her to block our connection. In fact I made a point of not going through her profile, because I don’t want to know all the gory details about her private life.

At the same time I have friends who hardly know my kids, adding them in their transparent need to appear more popular by increasing their number of contacts.

I think it will take many years for a networking site to arrive that will have longevity over fickle trends and offer users the tools and privacy to give them total control.

Great for us all to be able to dream about coming up with a simple brilliant idea that will make us a fortune, crap if you are a media giant who has just spent gazillions on a social network that has peaked, and numbers of people stated as users are actually lapsed and inactive.