Considering their rather iron grip on identity (FB Connect etc), and the network effects of the social graph (everyone is there), and their so-far pretty good execution (they're down a lot less than, say, the much smaller Twitter), what could, at this point, kill Facebook?
Honestly I don’t think Facebook will be that hard to kill because at its root it is a social movement and all social movements die based on two basic facts.
1. Kids rebel against their parents and don’t want to use the same things their parents use. Ironically this issue will be exacerbated by Facebook’s desire to force people to make everything public (“I’m grounded because my Mom saw those pictures you took at the party last night”).
2. The young are still building their social graph and can be more open to new things. So all those things that tie people to Facebook won’t be relevant to kids growing up today.
So new generations come into the market both inclined and able to pick new movements and hence unseat the existing ones.
Right now Facebook looks invincible because they have no real competition. They did a very smart thing in creating an API. In doing so they’ve tricked startups into making Facebook stronger with apps rather than creating competing solutions. So all Facebook has to do now is fend off the pathetic attempts at competition from large companies who aren’t agile enough to compete. So they have no real competition and kids have no real alternative.
But if an industrious startup with innovative ideas comes to market targeting the youth demo I think they could kill Facebook pretty quickly among that group and become dominant as that group grows up.
I don't agree with point 1. As a teacher (aged 11+), I can tell you most of the kids I know deserted myspace and bebo for facebook. Perhaps they want to be more grown up - kids want to be adults. And I am sure kids are way better with their privacy settings.
Point 2 - agreed - Facebook can be beaten. Some young upstart will come up with something kids want more. I doubt finer privacy control will clinch it, or more openness.
You make a good point but as I thought on it for a while I came up with this question: Do kids want to be the same kind of adults as their parents?
In other word, I can see your point that kids want to be more grown up. But kids do tend to rebel too. So if both of those are true the only explanation I can come up with is that kids want to be better adults. They want to one-up their parents by doing things better than they do.
Which I think is consistent with my theory in that they'd be drawn to a new Social Network and abandon Facebook to prove that they found a new social network that is way better than Facebook
(Also keep in mind Facebook started as a youth movement among College students. That doesn't necessarily apply to 11 years old but it's worth a mention)
Probably worth more than a mention. What if there was a new social network exclusive to college students (i.e. no parents or future bosses or people from high school)? It might not supplant facebook, but it is a model that has been proven to work.
"You make a good point but as I thought on it for a while I came up with this question: Do kids want to be the same kind of adults as their parents?"
My opinion is yes:
They want cars and motorcycles, and houses, and be respected, find friends, find love. The tools they use are just that, means for getting a goal.
I have been teacher too,in general I love kids, and I think is not kids wanting to change, is adults "hating change", halting grow when they get in their comfort zones once grown up.
When MySpace was deserted, it was because Facebook was the social network for High School and College students, so it had a cool, exclusive feel to it. Now Facebook has opened it up to the general public, and they're trying to make all information public, so they've killed that and I'm already seeing a newfound lack of interest in Facebook from High School students.
I like your points but I'm not sure FB is just a "social movement". We are on the 2nd generation of mobile phone users. My 15 yo daughter didn't forsake a cell phone because I have one.
In my mind it's an issue of "Enabling Device" vs "Venue". Put it this way. Say your hang out as a kid was a bowling alley you used to drive to every weekend. As you grew up and had kids you took them to that same bowling alley for Family Night. When your kids become old enough to drive they'll probably still use a car but they probably won't choose their parents' bowling alley as their hangout.
Same here. Kids will still use Laptops, PCs and Cell. Phones but probably won't use the same sites as their parents when going on the web. Because the PCs are enabling devices that get you some place while the sites themselves are venues that you go to.
Mobile phones/contracts aren't social graphs in a similar sense that Facebook or IM networks are. If Facebook can become a utility in a similar sense that email and mobile phones are, then it can survive the generation problem.
'The young are still building their social graph and can be more open to new things. So all those things that tie people to Facebook won’t be relevant to kids growing up today.'
I agree. Was talking to a 9yr-old yesterday and he didn't know what a playstation was. Thought he was kidding at first.
I don't think fb can be killed anytime soon though. It's just so big. Migration of half a billion people to another social networking service can't be simple.
Facebook won't be "killed". It probably won't disappear in an instant. But it may most likely fade away in time due to a confluence of many factors, not just one: 1. early adopters growing up, 2. decreasing marginal utility, 3. failure to directly align revenue with consumers, 4. lack of vision, 5. corporatism, 6. solipsism, 7. something better coming along.
Facebook gives you utility the first time you use it. It gets better as you figure it out and your friends join. So your marginal utility is increasing. But then after a while, all things being equal (i.e. Facebook makes no upgrades), your marginal utility must at some point start to decrease in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. It's like eating an ice cream. Maybe you have another ice cream and then another but at some point you're going to get sick. In Facebook's case, there's only so much Facebooking you can do before you start getting bored. Unless Facebook manage to keep launching new features, improving things to counteract this. And doing that is no easy task. As your user base grows, your software has to become even more and more addictive to compensate. I think there's more a problem with diminishing marginal utility with Facebook than there is with Amazon or Google or Apple or maybe even Twitter since the latter seem to serve a more direct, simpler, more basic need.
I think there's a big difference between being bored with your friends and being bored with Facebook. I'm bored of Facebook. It's sole use for me at this point is to track down people I can't find otherwise (e.g. people I haven't talked to in a long time)
IF (big if) Facebook's profitability is only illusionary[1], then Facebook could die in an instant. If Facebook's profits only come through churning advertisers, FB could die if the growth that pulled in those advertisers stopped.
It costs real money to keep Facebook's servers running and Facebook's employees working. If a market shift revealed Facebook as a money-sink "as far as the eye can see", then the folks other than Zuckerberg who control that money will want to use it for something else.
One might ask what magic does FB really have for profitability that Myspace didn't have? I'd like to hear how this magic will come from more users in and of itself.
There's a number of angles of attack available. It's certainly hard to top Facebook purely on the social graph (as you mentioned, everyone is on it). But I think you can attack Facebook on areas they lack and areas they've fallen down on.
1. Mobile. Facebook does have one of the top mobile apps on the planet, with its iPhone app at the top of the download list for quite some time. But I think it's fair to say Facebook doesn't really care about mobile; the iPhone app languished with overt bugs for half a year before they fixed some of them recently. They have no iPad app. They no longer innovate in this arena (more on that next), and while that probably won't be the case forever, there's a great opportunity for a network with a best-in-class app to take the lead here.
2. Innovation in social. Take, for example, geolocation. Foursquare and Gowalla have definitely found some new niche that will be here to stay: people like to know where friends are, where the currently happening thing is. I've tried those services three or four times each and, while interesting, still aren't compelling enough. Facebook has done nothing here. Yet.
3. Out-facebooking Facebook. I'm a member of the initial Facebook group: my school was something like the fifth school on the site. Things have changed dramatically from those humble beginnings. It's much harder for me to cut through all the Facebook app bullshit today and actually find out what's going on with my friends: status updates, photos, events, that sort of thing. Things that actually matter. People still will want to play games, but I think there's a huge part of the population that just want a clean, social network again. I've expanded on this on a short blog post last month, if you're interested in reading more (and I apologize if you're not): http://zachholman.com/2010/05/rebuild-facebook
While I don't think Facebook will die a Friendster death in a poof of magic scaling sprinkles, I do think there's opportunity yet for a small outfit to out-innovate them, out Facebook them, or just otherwise carve a lucrative niche for themselves in the market.
Completely with you on point 3. I know a lot of people who do one thing on Facebook: spy on people. Facebook singlehandedly turned "stalk" into a word for a socially acceptable activity. Every new feature that got added after "look at people's photos so they don't realize it, with better web design than myspace, and the assurance that you actually know your 'friends'" has been grumbled about in my social circle. Any product that preserves that essential capability while cutting out the BS has a shot. Honestly, I think explicitly billing yourself as a recreation of "the old facebook" is not only a good idea, but the best idea, from this standpoint.
Perhaps "Ye Olde Tome of Countenance: A Throwback to the Days When Facebook Didn't Suck - Click here to import your profile and photos"
the first two angles make sense. Facebook is what facebook is because of the culture around it. Culture changes with the emergence of new technologies/features. So i would think that the most probable scenario for a facebook death involves new companies that make better use of emerging technologies, e.g. geolocation. And i happen to believe that if facebook drops the ball on geolocation, and geolocation services see a major increase in popularity, we may see the birth of a competitive social graph. That is a real possibility.
As for your third angle, I think there is room for a niche-facebook that could be crazy profitable--but i don't see a niche social network taking over the social graph. that seems relatively far-fetched.
If you had asked in 1994 what would kill Windows/Office, would you have understood the answer of "people want to socialize with their friends"?
The same thing will happen here for a timeline of 5-10 years: Facebook will likely be the dominant player in an old and boring space called social networking.
Maybe virtual reality will be big (people walking around with really helpful devices in their pockets/on their eyes), or something you can't even think of.
What killed Windows: the Internet and mobile devices have made the desktop OS less relevant, combined with healthy competition from Apple.
What killed Office: once again, the Internet is making desktop applications obsolete. Enter Google docs.
Socialization is in a different market than office productivity, so "people wanting to socialize with their friends" killing "Windows/Office" seems a non sequitur.
The only problem with this argument is that Windows and Office are both more popular than they've ever been and industry-wide, people are purchasing more desktop/laptop/notebook PCs per year than ever before. So if by "dead" you mean "more popular than ever" then I guess this argument holds water.
It's true that of late the focus has been mobile, mobile, mobile, and Microsoft missed the boat here to a degree, but only in comparison to what Apple did, which is start a revolution around the idea of easy, mobile devices. This is a completely different market than the desktop market, and the popularity of one doesn't mean the death of the other. By the way, people have been calling for the death of the desktop since the 80s. 90s. 00s. Hasn't happened yet. Down the road...who knows.
You're right, and I think they are starting to sense it. This presents an interesting parallel universe in which Microsoft actually starts to channel some of that famous "underdog" energy that Steve Jobs himself channeled.
Lately I've actually heard sympathy for Microsoft in areas that used to be viciously anti-MS. It seems some of the hatred for MS has been transferred to Apple, and to a lesser extent, over to Google. But that's probably my subjective experience. I do think to the extent Microsoft can go lean, hungry, and humble, it will go better for them in the years to come.
Both office and windows are still massive cash cows for Microsoft, I guess Facebook could do the same thing, slowly become less relevant while still controlling a massive market and turning massive profits.
Of course Facebook still seem much more nimble in their space, maybe they will be able to jump in early on the next big thing.
I think in the immediate feature innovative mobile products could unseat a lot of the current platforms, many of which have been slow to (or done so poorly) implement mobile interfaces.
I think just like we've moved from desktop to web applications you're going to see a similar move from web to mobile interfaces. This is will be especially true of social networking platforms.
Google has direct control of one of the major upcoming mobile operating systems and because they host the contact/relationship graph I think they could make a confident push into Facebook's space if they were so inclined.
Facebook could die a slow death when the world figures out how to create an open, federated version of Facebook.
Instead of placing central control of our social graph with an organization that believes people are essentially targets on the great Advertising Dartboard of the future, you could distribute control of that graph.
Instead of logging into Facebook to connect to your friends, you'd simply have your "profile"--your web page or other net identity--and things like status updates, tweets (because this is also how you "kill" Twitter), likes, groups, friends, etc., would be handled by the protocol.
In short: you kill Facebook by building an open protocol that does the same thing.
"Facebook could die a slow death when the world figures out how to create an open, federated version of Facebook."
So my whole career in this industry is helping companies 'get open' and embrace 'open'... and I can tell you this is not what will kill Facebook.
Being 'open' isn't a feature consumers directly care about. The teenager on the street corner, the mom in the grocery store, the middle-aged office worker... they are not going to use Service X over Facebook "because it is open".
That means nothing to them. There's nothing in there which explains to a normal person why there is any problem in making their tweets, likes, groups, etc on Facebook.
Further more, disparate services which rely on users having their own control of their node (Dispora, DiSo) make no sense when 99% of most normal people have no web hosting or other way of hosting such a node.
If there's one thing we've learnt from recent Facebook debacles, it is that people appreciate a level of privacy and control around their profile data. Now, open doesn't equate to no privacy - but you have to expect and assume that all nodes will treat privacy the same, otherwise the system fails. With a closed system you simply have to trust one actor with your privacy - the host network.
Finally, the 'dartboard of advertising' is what gives companies like Facebook the resource to outcompete their rivals. If an alternative service doesn't have that kind of advertising strategy then it's going to find it hard to compete with the might of FB.
Open may form part of the ultimate successor to Facebook, but it is just as likely to be something totally closed as Facebook. Open/closed is [sadly] not what consumers care about.
Well actually I agree. Well-stated. Open may form part of the ultimate successor to FB. It's 100% true the average Facebook user doesn't know, and doesn't care, about "open". But what being open wins you is support of the community, and in particular, "developers, developers, developers".
Take the (by no means parallel, but similar) case of iPhone vs. Android. The typical user could care less about whether iPhone is "open" or not, provided their apps work and their calls don't drop (heh). Still, Android makes a compelling case to developers and to handset manufacturers. Android gets huge points for being "open", and over time, I think that creates a head-leads, body-follows scenario where early adopters, tech evangelists, and people who surf sites like HN move to the new platform (whatever it is) en masse. Some time later, "normal" users then gravitate to that platform because the thought leaders have gone there, that's where the hype is, etc.
To put it another way: being open doesn't necessarily win you normal, everyday users. But it can win you the power users, the early adopters, and the thought leaders; and where they go, "normal" users tend to follow in time.
As for the "how do users host their own node" issue, I agree. This will never happen if people have to (my God, the horror) sign up for a web hosting account to have a Facebook page. But in an Internet where "websites" are torn off from the cloud at will, and where creating a "website" or "web identity" is as easy as pressing a button -- easier, in fact, than it is to create a Facebook page currently -- I think that's when you'll start to see user-controlled nodes become a real possibility for the mass market. Not before.
"But what being open wins you is support of the community, and in particular, "developers, developers, developers"."
I think the Android argument can play out the other way, and I say that as someone who is onto his 3rd Android phone, never owned an iPhone yet was an Objective C programmer in a former life and total mac-head.
Android may be open, and Apple App Store has it's problems but monetization opportunities are much bigger on iOS platform because everything is geared towards paying for apps. No one I know pays for apps on Android.
Plus, app dev for iPhone is cheaper because it's (sort of) one platform rather than Android's disparate handsets due to it's very openness.
Another case in point: Facebook FBML Platform vs Open Social. Developers way preferred the close Facebook Platform over the open standard Open Social (again, I was part of that so I say it with some disappointment).
> disparate services which rely on users having their own control of their node (Dispora, DiSo) make no sense when 99% of most normal people have no web hosting or other way of hosting such a node
Facebook effectively provides limited, specialized web hosting supported by ads. There's no reason companies can't offer exactly the same thing via open protocols.
> Now, open doesn't equate to no privacy - but you have to expect and assume that all nodes will treat privacy the same, otherwise the system fails. With a closed system you simply have to trust one actor with your privacy - the host network.
With a federated system you have the ability to blacklist nodes that misbehave. With a closed system you have virtually no ability to influence the provider's behaviour. I know which I'd choose.
> Open/closed is [sadly] not what consumers care about
Maybe not directly, but an open platform creates the possibility of competition between application providers. Consumers didn't want Compuserve or MSN 1.0, they wanted The Internet.
"Facebook effectively provides limited, specialized web hosting supported by ads. There's no reason companies can't offer exactly the same thing via open protocols."
If a few companies offer the hosting of nodes, rather than true "open"/"federated" where each user is in personal control of his node than really you have little change than the current system.
Rather than a monopoly on the social graph, you will have a biopoly/etc with control still spread between a small group of actors who will just bound together for mutual benefit.
The idea of true federation and disparate systems where each user is in personal control of his node is really the utopia. But sadly it's never going to happen.
I highly doubt that facebook can be killed by building any open protocols, there are already protocols like foaf+ssl that could be used to build an open social networking, but that doesnt make it facebook killer. People use facebook because there are lots of other people using it and they don't care about openness as much as a geek do. Facebook would be killed only by time something even cool looking appear. And why do we want to kill facebook, anyway.
I don't see any way of killing Facebook "at this point." Think about what Facebook does: It connects people, in a constant stream sort of way. And you can count on being connected to almost everyone you know through Facebook just by signing in (over 1/4 of everyone on the internet is on Facebook, and I imagine this fraction is much higher in The US and other English-speaking countries). How would one overcome this barrier?
Another problem is that Facebook is responsive to market pressures. Despite the recent "Exodus" of privacy-aware folks being little more than a trickle, they made changes to the way their privacy works. They adapt, and any significant improvement offered by a competitor will be added to Facebook's arsenal (Tagging in statuses, for example).
Finally, knowing all of this, it is much easier to simply include Facebook Connect in a social service than to leave it out. By including it, you get over that first critical-mass hurdle. The problem is that by including it, you are also putting no pressure on Facebook or increasing the drive to migrate to your service.
Google's attack on identity seems to consist of making it more open, through various standards. Hasn't succeeded yet, but it's possible that, once identity settles down in a form that's stable (there's too much innovation still going on), the open formats will become more attractive and eventually win. So that's how identity might play out, although it would take time.
Facebook was good to keep track of friends but as friends and applications are increasing, I am seeing high noise to signal ratio.
I think if Facebook doesn't manage that part it is going to be like Altavista of search. Lots of people used it but they didn't know what they were missing until Google came along.
We need something that adds value in peoples lives along with entertainment and socialization.
Facebook killer would not be something having more features and something more shiny than facebook but it rethinks how people should socialize. Not just serve as platform for viral marketing and time sinking games.
I'm thinking a Facebook IPO might change the pace of things a bit. Once they're answerable to shareholders and wallstreet and people that are more concerned about profit than social media, their tune may change slightly. I'm sure they'll do okay, but being a public company and answerable to shareholders does make things different. Recall the outrage when YHOO refused to sell to MSFT, who was offering an above market value per share. No one cared about the well being of either company. Certainly not the shareholders and certainly not wallstreet.
Facebook most powerful use case was that of doing social research. You want to know who your future employee, classmate, brother-in-law, etc. is. It made all of us our own private investigators, and allowed us to make judgements from the comfort of our own homes. With a [rightfully] increased consciousness of privacy (the backlash of the consequences of all of this "research"), Facebook is going to be less and less useful for this task moving forward.
Now that I've got a year of undergrad left, I can safely say that my two uses of Facebook are Tetris and connecting with family. For Facebook to succeed, it needs to get better at intentional information sharing (writing on walls and messages do not encompass the ideal experience) as opposed to the passive information sharing that we've all used it for for so long.
I don't think it's possible for Facebook to pivot (and, basically, abandon a whole lot of work) to just being a way to share pictures, messages, and plans with friends and family (which, I believe, will be what people want moving forward).
An open / distributed alternative. Facebook today is like some initial proprietary version of email. Sooner or later, an open standard protocol for "sharing" and "social networking" (EMAIL + FOAF?) will take over. (And it has to be distributed, like email)
Could a consistent effort by a deep-pocketed competitor kill them, if they can't find a good way to monetize (which seems unlikely)? The same way Bing is attacking Google search: just spend heaps of money on it, and wait for the other party to make a mistake?
If Google can somehow get access to the data they need to make search social, enough of it to make sure facebook's search isn't better, then they might not need to kill fb, they may not be threatened.
Here in Germany studiVZ is the leading social platform. studiVZ started off as a clone of facebook and they're still pretty much stuck on the initial version.
facebook only recently started to slowly gaining traction here.
Given that facebook is functionally (news feed, apps) and visually (less obtrusive adds) way superior to facebook the main reason for the slow adoption is surely that "everybody" is on studiVZ.
Given that facebook is real good executed I don't see any way it's getting serious competition anytime soon.
What could kill Facebook would be a solution that respects people's privacy needs and doesn't try to change people in this respect. This is obviously only one piece of the solution, but Facebook are setting themselves up for this market entrypoint / wedge (recall Friendster's war on Fakesters).
Facebook is trying to change people rather than serve their needs.
No one cares about privacy. At least no significant number of the 500M users of Facebook. At best, maybe a million cares? And I'm being generous. Not even a thorn on Facebook's side.
I disagree. People do care about privacy, they just have no way to show it other than to quit facebook and that's something they're not prepared to do.
They'd rather put up with poor privacy controls and keep their account than have no account at all. Just because they're not leaving now, doesn't mean they won't leave when a viable alternative to facebook comes up.
Yeah, I remember telling my increasingly wall-eyed girlfriend about all the data facebook collects and what they do with it and why this means we and everyone we know should switch to the first viable alternative. Her response: "So what? How does it change my life one bit if every company in the world knows exactly what I buy on the internet and what's on my facebook profile? It's not like there are naked or even particularly embarassing pictures there. I just want to see if someone I used to go to school with is fat/a skank/ugly/got religion and then check back in a month or two to see if it's still true. If I can do that, I don't care what Facebook knows about me or who they sell it to."
People care about privacy, but they become complacent in giving it up. Remember the days when people were too scared to put their credit card into an internet website? Things have changed a lot since then, and it's hardly been 10 years.
A lot of people didn't care about social networking before it became prevalent also, but that didn't mean there was a social networking opportunity.
I have some track record in spotting opportunities, esp. in social networking. This is one piece of the puzzle in outflanking facebook and a vulnerability they've chosen, imho. The privacy of the initial years of facebook was a significant ingredient in their success.
Clearly the competitor will not be 'the same as fb but w/ privacy'.
We can find ways to say no, or create ways to make 'yes'. ;)
Right, they don't care right now. We're in the infancy of the internet age.
Once the culture matures, we may see more predators preying on this information at which point privacy will become a hot button topic (for a while). This could be con artists or the "facebook serial killer" or whatever.
Also, the users that care about privacy (e.g. me) aren't on facebook...
Almost, but not quite. An alternative also has to deliver guarantees. It has to be impossible for the potential alternative to be mean.
Fortunately for Facebook, that would mean that each user of this alternative has a personal server at home to run it. And with hurdles such as asymmetric DSL, dynamic IP, Firewalls, NAT routers, and plain ignorance (the internet is very young and few people actually know what it is yet), it will take time. Two decades at least.
A social network, that relies on its good privacy options to attract visitors, would definitely not compete with Facebook. In fact, i'm pretty sure most people on Facebook don't even care that much about their privacy.
agreed. people do care about 'uncomfortable' moments though... your friends' mom sees your embarassing pics and tells your mom... those photos of your lawyer in a bikini getting sent around the industry...
Dead simple: just tell what you want to, to whom you want to, and no one else. Just like you would with reasonable tools like e-mail, instant messaging, or physical interaction. Normal, ordinary social networking. Ironically, Facebook, doesn't let you do just that.
Now, you probably use the term "social networking" for something different from "interacting with people". If so, I'd like to know how you define social networking.
If your idea of social networking is fulfilled by email, instant messaging, and physical interaction, then why would you want another tool that did things fundamentally differently anyway? That's a classic case of "you have no need for Facebook", not "Facebook is evil because it doesn't do what you'd like".
Actually, I don't (want another tool). So, of course it's a case of "I have no need for Faceboook" (though I do think Facebook is evil).
Now I asked a question. Let me reformulate it: how do you define "social networking"? Why do you thing it is hard to reconcile it with privacy paranoia?
I don't think the term "social networking" is amenable to a formal, logical definition. It's mostly a category used to describe sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Loopt (previously Friendster and Orkut) so any site or service resembling those would be social networking. (Please refer here for the type of theory I am applying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_theory)
So far the most successful of those sites is Facebook; Facebook is difficult to use if one is paranoid about one's privacy. None of the other partial or past successes were successful due to their exceptional concern for privacy. One does not join a site designed for sharing things with other people in order to hide things from other people.
Decentralisation of social networks: A protocol built on top of email.
All your info would be held by your email provider (gmail, say), and when your friends log onto their email (yahoo, say) your new updates are download for them to view.
If problems with getting email providers to abide by protocols specs aren't too large, I really could see this working.
I would say, practically nothing! FB already has a mammoth number of users hooked to it and don't forget the ever increasing population as well as number of internet users in countries like India. So there still are more number of people joining FB than leaving it.
I think Facebook is very strong and unlikely to die anytime soon.
One thing that can happen is HUGE breach in upcoming Facebook Credits platform. If they manage to loose a lot of money of their users and partners, it can be big. But I do not think it is likely.
Maybe Facebook will kill Facebook. Like how Winamp killed Winamp. Winamp is so bloated now that I can't believe anyone still uses it. Maybe there will be so much Farmville and other garbage that its more trouble than its worth.
I don't know if it would completely "kill" Facebook, but there would be a dramatic drop in usage if Zynga (Farmville,Mafia Wars,etc.) fell off the face of the earth.
This is a great question, but I'm not sure "kill" is the right way to look at it. The better question might be, what makes it less relevant? I have a hard time believing that Facebook will ever "die." A lot of websites that were once hot and the leaders in their categories are pushed to the side as a somewhat tangential/very similar product is introduced. I'm thinking Yahoo and Myspace as two examples.
Both Yahoo and MySpace are still around (and still very relevant for some), but have shifted as Google and Facebook respectively have come in. They've become less relevant in what we think as their core competencies - Yahoo for search (though their drive to be a portal might have done them in) and Myspace for social networking. What is interesting is how both of these companies have evolved into I would say more niche specialties. Yahoo has great finance and fantasy football tools. MySpace is now the place for music/bands to post their work (The first and probably only time I went to MySpace this year was when I stumbled on a link to the very popular TV show Glee tryouts (a friend was trying out I was supposed to vote for) on MySpace. It got me thinking, why wouldn't they do this on Facebook, soon recognizing that Facebook couldn't support the type of functionality required for the contest. Could that be potentially something Facebook will suffer for in the future? Probably not that one example, but maybe a suite of features.
I guess my point here is that I doubt Facebook will ever "die." The only time that I could see it dying (nice post TomOfTTB) is as it's a complete generational shift where our generation's kids (I'm 23) use some wildly new disruptive technology that's more relevant for the time. My guess is, though, our generation will be using Facebook for many many years to come.
I will be interested if and how it evolves like MySpace/Yahoo. Will it end up niching itself? I took an informal survey of friends who talked about using Facebook explicitly for "what's going on with my friends" (aka stalk their facebook albums and walls to get up to date on what's going on) as opposed to Twitter which is (for me and some of my friends at least) much more about "what's going on in the world? what articles did these cool people I respect find?" Pictures on Facebook are done very well and I could see that being a future niche.
It's a fascinating time to be involved in the internet as it's still to young almost to have "history" or "throwbacks" (some might disagree, I know). I would guess that the "movements" TomOfTTB refers to will be happening throughout the history of the internet. To give an metaphor with the auto industry, it might be like the revival of the VW Beatle/Bug cars (popular in the 60s) get revived 40 years later. It might be that a website like MySpace (or even Facebook someday) goes out of style one decade, but then somehow comes back. It sure will be an interesting ride whatever happens!
Facebook's weakness is that it thinks it is an owner instead of just an enabler. So instead of just easily enabling you to keep track of your friends and your communication with them, FB thinks it owns all of this -- a crazy idea that any 12-year-old would reject.
The only reason they've gotten away with it is because legally they have some basis to work with, and socially they haven't annoyed their users.
FB will die when somebody launches a new browser that takes all of your social information and copies it to an open, secure, and non-proprietary format -- perhaps in addition to posting it on FB. This poses no pain for the user, yet allows others to participate in their social graph without having to use FB. It's also the thing FB fears the most.
Other than that, not much. As more and more people get sucked into FB by their friends, the service becomes more and more ingrained in the psyche of the users. Just guessing here, but I don't see product X coming out with a few new whizbang features and putting much of a dent in that.
The only thing that can kill facebook (if nothing changes about the product itself, i.e. the same growth and same increasing utility) would be people losing interest in social interaction.
1. Kids rebel against their parents and don’t want to use the same things their parents use. Ironically this issue will be exacerbated by Facebook’s desire to force people to make everything public (“I’m grounded because my Mom saw those pictures you took at the party last night”).
2. The young are still building their social graph and can be more open to new things. So all those things that tie people to Facebook won’t be relevant to kids growing up today.
So new generations come into the market both inclined and able to pick new movements and hence unseat the existing ones.
Right now Facebook looks invincible because they have no real competition. They did a very smart thing in creating an API. In doing so they’ve tricked startups into making Facebook stronger with apps rather than creating competing solutions. So all Facebook has to do now is fend off the pathetic attempts at competition from large companies who aren’t agile enough to compete. So they have no real competition and kids have no real alternative.
But if an industrious startup with innovative ideas comes to market targeting the youth demo I think they could kill Facebook pretty quickly among that group and become dominant as that group grows up.