• Associated Press , Monday, October 9, 2006 11:45 AM

It was unthinkable a year ago, but that's how fast things change in the worlds of older teens and 20somethings: MySpace has become passé for many. The Associated Press cited one 26-year-old graduate student who just canceled his MySpace account. After realizing he had wasted time accumulating a bunch of acquaintances he knew little about, he lamented that the "superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt," in a column for Iowa State University's student newspaper. "It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails." What does that mean? Perhaps kids of the tech generation are now rediscovering the value of face time, which would be a bad thing for News Corp. and MySpace.

Many people--especially those in the Internet media business--spend way too much online, working, multitasking, socializing. We tend to spend more time with colleagues and clients communicating via email and instant messaging platforms than we do face-to-face or even on the phone. Perhaps the novelty of the wired life is wearing off? As a recent comScore survey shows, MySpace's member base of 12- to-24-year-olds has plummeted 44.3 percent over the last year, as a share of its total, to just 30 percent. "I think we're at the very beginning of them reaching a saturation point," Iowa State journalism professor Michael Bugeja says.

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