People are leaving MySpace in droves, the WSJ reports. Apparently overwhelmed by spam friend requests, lots of former users are giving up altogether. (My favorite quote from this article: "He realized: "'If it's a picture of someone fairly attractive, they're probably not my friend in real life.'" Poor guy!)

The companies deny there's been an increase in deletions, despite their traffic drops, but to me that means little. Most people don't delete their pages; they just stop going back.

I've long thought these social networking sites were overhyped, just like virtual worlds are now, but had a sneaking suspicion that it might be because I'm too old to get interested in them. But this seems to bear me out. The drop in usage on Facebook and MySpace promises to be an avalanche. Just as these sites became increasingly useful as more people signed up, they will be come exponentially less so as fewer and fewer "real" people return. I predict that within a year, MySpace will be a virtual ghost town, populated only by corporate avatars and porn-spam-bots.

SecondLife, sit up and take notice. The virtual world creators need to be careful about how they handle the media frenzy and new ad dollars and put in policies and safeguards now, not later, to prevent spamming and retain the value of their communities. Otherwise they, too, will eventually die.

(I'd also love to find any writing and research anyone's done on the lifecycles of virtual communities vs. real-life communities. Is it possible they have a built-in expiration, just due to the limited attention people can pay to things not directly in front of them?)