Myspace is a has-been website now. It's dropped from no. 4 to no. 11 on the alexa.com rankings. Facebook has taken place at no. 4.

I don't doubt that twitter has grown a lot faster than facebook and myspace. Whilst twitter is a purely text based service, there are services that compliment it like twitpic, which allow you to upload pictures and post the link on twitter. There are clients for smartphones that automate this process, such as "twitterfon" on the iPhone, so twitter is easily accessible while people are on the go - call it a portable blogging service if you will. I post on twitter using my phone while I'm on the train, it's so easy.

There are also a lot of celebrities that use twitter. Many people just use it for that reason. Some of my favourite comedians post on twitter every day, it's a good read.

My point is, social networking websites evolve on a regular basis. IRC has been the same since it was first created pretty much. There's little reason for people to carry on using a purely text based service when there are so many other, more fully featured services around today.

According to netsplit.de there were 843,412 users on IRC in its entirety in the last week. Now let's take a look at facebook as a comparison:

Quote:
* More than 200 million active users
* More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day


Source - facebook's own stats page.

I think it's fairly obvious what the masses prefer wink