Gina Bianchini helped usher in the age of social media nearly a decade ago when she co-founded Ning, a social networking site that launched the same year as Facebook.

But even Bianchini, a serial entrepreneur who has spent more than 10 years in Silicon Valley, finds herself at times overwhelmed by the growing number of social media sites now competing for her time, updates and energy. She helped raise the beast -- and now she faces the challenge of taming it.

“With all the sharing, I find that I wake up and I’m checking this and I’m checking that and at a certain point, it’s like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ It’s high fructose corn syrup rather than high quality rock sugar,” Bianchini said.

She will not go so far as to say that social media fatigue has already set in among online audiences, though she likens the trend to a recession: It’s a phenomenon that can only be concretely quantified once it’s been underway for some time, she said.

“We are definitely at a point where the supply of things to do online is at a dramatic overcapacity relative to what we can actually do in our lives as human beings,” Bianchini explained. “When you have technology that has an infinite supply of possibility and you have finite time, at a certain point, people shut down. They simply cannot handle anything else.”

Hardly a day goes by without an aspiring Zuckerberg launching a fresh social media startup that promises new solutions to the problem of sharing photos, meeting strangers offline or redeeming discounts for local restaurants. Even industry heavyweights like Walmart, Toyota, Apple and Disney are attempting to develop their own alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, with mixed success.

Bianchini argues that this new generation of social networking sites, which are born into an already crowded marketplace, will be doomed if they offer nothing beyond an outlet for people to connect and post updates. Her point is not that heavyweights like Facebook and Twitter are on their way out, but that to succeed, up-and-coming social media companies must prove they offer their users valuable services that will improve their lives in concrete ways. In the new Web 3.0 reality, users who have grown accustomed to sharing now want to be shaped -- online and off.

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