Early stats on the three big social networks shows Twitter risks being nothing more than a fad while rival Facebook's retention levels were consistent and MySpace lost some of the kids once the mainstream media picked upon the site.

When it comes to the Internet, there are trends and there are fads. During the net’s infancy, enough companies created websites to make the move to the Information Superhighway (remember that term?) a trend. Facebook was a fad that, with more than 20M users, became a trend. Make no mistake: Twitter is a phenomenon that can’t be ignored. It has more than 7M users, a 1382% YoY growth rate, and 41.7% of its users are in the demographic sweet spot: 35 to 49 years old.

But this fad isn’t yet a trend, and social networking by 140 characters is at a significant crossroads.

Make no mistake: Twitter is a phenomenon that can’t be ignored. It has more than 7M users, a 1,382% YoY growth rate, and 41.7% of its users are in the demographic sweet spot: 35 to 49 years old.

Ratings giant Nielson Online reports more than 60% of Twitter users stop using the service after the Honeymoon period. For some reason following Ashton Kutcher’s pontifications on life and Oprah Winfrey’s tweets about her girlfriend Gail aren’t enough to keep us coming back.

— Quick jump to the solution, links to popular Twits, and the online poll —

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