Social networkers have little loyalty

Half of social networkers maintain multiple profiles.

Surfers have little loyalty when it comes to social networking websites, according to a new study from US research house Parks Associates.

MySpace users are chronically unfaithful, according to Parks Associates' Web 2.0 & the New Net report on the social networking market.

The study found that nearly 40 percent of MySpace users also keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook.

Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, where more than 50 percent of all users actively maintain multiple profiles.

Parks Associates said that these trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services.

Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site and one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets and the users themselves.

"MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that ironically now extends beyond MySpace itself," said John Barrett, lead author of the report.

This environment creates fertile ground for new social networking sites and application providers, according to Barrett.

"A handful of users are all it takes to connect new services to the MySpace-centred environment. From there it can begin to spread virally assuming, of course, that it offers something people want," he said.