Look, I hate The Reg as much as everyone else but they’ve nailed the Facebook situation here. Numbers don’t lie and the numbers show interest waning in these time-suck Web sites. Much love and namaste to Ted at Uncov who figured out that the only way to make money on Facebook is to sell ads to other Facebook application developers, and what this amounts to is a repeat of the late-90s bubble:

Ted Dziuba of the recently-departed, much-missed blog Uncov put it best: “Fuck, this is a pyramid scheme. There is no money input into this system except venture capital. I remember a time, long long ago, when tech companies spent their own venture capital on each other, so revenues were all booked from the same small pool of money. Yeah, as I recall, it didn’t end well.”

The Reg is also correct in predicting that very very soon we’ll have the usual cast of Web 2.0 cheerleaders claiming that Facebook is still a huge transformative game-changing media giant and the world has changed and those who disagree just don’t get it:

This time around, expect spinners to work on massaging the comScore figures, and happy-clappy bloggers to leap to social networking’s defence by claiming the falls are sign of the market maturing, and of fierce competition. They could be right, but it still means that the individual business are not the goldmine their greedy backers slavered over.

Scoble? Owen? Start typing.