Jeffrey Cole says Facebook's only got five years left

DIGITAL consumer expert Jeffrey Cole gives social networking giant Facebook five years before its audience begins to splinter.

Dr Cole, who addressed a digital marketing forum hosted by Ninemsn in Sydney this morning, predicted the site would be no more successful than MySpace and Bebo at hanging onto the fickle teenage audience.

Dr Cole, who predicted the decline of MySpace at an earlier appearance he made for Ninemsn in Sydney four years ago, said it would take longer for Facebook's dominance to be challenged because of its global scale.

The social network, which yesterday announced it would launch an email service, has more than 500 million users worldwide.

"The same thing will happen to Facebook but it's going to take a lot longer," Dr Cole said.

"And it's not going to be replaced by one big social networking community but it's going to fragment."

Dr Cole, who is the director of the Centre for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California and a director of the World Internet Project — which for a decade has tracked how the internet has affected people's media consumption habits — also predicted few newspapers in the US would be around in five years' time.

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