Facebook overlooks the fact that lock-in is nearly meaningless on the web, so you can't treat your user base as a given. eBay is ignoring this. Myspace ignored this and they're nearly irrelevant now.
Companies are growing to the multi-billion dollar mark faster than ever. That trend will only continue as technological advances continue. What will happen in the near future as SSDs get better, larger, and cheaper? What will happen as multi-core CPUs continue their progression? As always, single newer machines become capable of replacing multiple older machines. At what point in the future does the equivalent storage, processing, and transactional volume capabilities of an entire datacenter of today fit into a single server room tomorrow? A single rack? A single 1U server? A single VPS instance?
In the not too distance future the ability to host applications like facebook that serve hundreds of millions or even billions of users will be just a click away and cheap enough to fall under the "ramen profitability" umbrella. Giant, billion user apps will be the viral videos of tomorrow. Companies will grow to enormous sizes not in a matter of years or months but in a matter of days, or hours.
What happens when your billion dollar, thousand dev. corporation has serious competition in the form of a 5 person startup?
On some level heroku , amazon cloud etc achieve exactly the kind of equality you talk about.
On the other hand our ability to create data might outpace moores law and might hence required continued usage of data centers.
My current guess is that Tumblr is going to figure out the real potential of their "reblogging" system sometime in the next 18 months and whatever strange new beast that has become will make "liking" look like using an AOL keyword.
Developing products with practical value. Early Facebook was a great little tool for keeping in touch with friends and getting invited to parties. They could have built on that aspect and made something useful.
Instead they decided to encourage the kind of spam that generates page impressions that sell ads like a media company...
Lucky they're full of clever people, I guess.
It could have been Diaspora but the Diaspora team made such a big public splash and have so many eyeballs now I'm not so sure. Surely somebody at the top of Facebook has got to be looking at that Kickstarter pledge level of $200k and thinking, "Uh, Mark? We have to talk..."
Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas--social networking is all about sharing information with people and privacy is all about keeping information from people. That's like saying Google ("organize the world's information") overlooked the importance of disorganization or ignorance. It won't be privacy at all that Facebook overlooks, it'll be something completely orthogonal to that axis.
It is, however, true that Facebook is unlike Google in that, while nearly everyone wants to find information, not everyone wants to share information with other people.
Socializing however is all about varying levels of privacy.
I won't tell my coworkers or boss the same things I tell my friends, I won't tell my friends what I tell my close friends, and my family sits on the highest tier.
Maybe facebook will get this maybe it won't, or in general maybe it is impossible on the web where information tends to be so open.
Nobody at Facebook told you that Facebook was the best way to discuss the most personal aspects of your life with the people who are closest to you--though it includes private messaging, which may be good enough if you can't see them in person.
If you want privacy, don't share private information on Facebook. If you want to remain ignorant of your favorite sports team's latest scores or the most disgusting new genre of porn or how some movie you haven't seen yet ends, don't look them up on Google. The "next big thing" that Facebook is going to miss is not something people can already get by simply restricting their usage of Facebook, it'll be on a different axis entirely.
"Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas"
No is not. Privacy is about managing social networking, the ability to connect to those I want as I want,not someone else telling me how should I do that.
As you get more social, you get more people telling you private things.
Agreed that privacy and social networks are opposing ideas. But, they are opposing ideas only because how Facebook defines a user's "social network." The entire world is not my "social network." So, IMHO, addressing privacy may need a change in that thinking/definition of what a social network is.
That's certainly what Facebook believes. What it doesn't really understand (possibly because its people have gone straight there from college and continued in the same atmosphere) is that normal people want a certain amount of separation between their networks, e.g. work/social/personal.
yeah but...those lines are blurring and not just because of facebook. partially to do with increasing ease of travel and long-distance communication, partially to do with changing attitudes about family maybe? surely there are many other factors, and more still around the bend.
this isn't to say that i don't ever want to say something to my friends but not family, or vice-versa. more often my issues with the "audience" for my facebook posts have to do with various groups interest in the subject of the post - people i went to high school with mostly don't care about python, or some great restaurant out here across the country.
Rich Google in 2004 overlooked the value of social networking (both their in-house hit Orkut and outside services).