There’ve been some rumblings that Facebook has jumped the shark. (Recall the mid-October Jossip survey about annoying Facebook habits.)

SiliconAlleyInsider yesterday noted that ABCNews.com’s political reporter Facebook pages are bombing. This could just be because they chose the wrong subject to launch with. Or because people are just really tired of the political campaign, which seems to have gone on too long already.

I predict within the next 12 months we’ll see users trickle out Facebook’s door and head to the next networking site.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.com took a look at the upgraded features in Multiply.com. While they look very attactive, I’m getting tired of signing up for yet another social network that will ultimately flame out.

So what does this mean for news organizations? A huge opportunity to further engage a loyal audience and bring in new readers/community members/eyeballs.

Social networks require four things:

  • a community of active users who can connect from any device — desktop, laptop, phone
  • a way to send private and public messages (including comments) to each other and to groups
  • a repository for files of unlimited (or at least very large) size and a way to tag, search and connect those files to other content
  • good, unique, content (which, for news organizations, should be a piece of cake)
  • a way to search, select and rank all types of files, comments, users and content, and share the data anywhere

Think you can do it?