Facebook's biggest limiting factor is the word "friend". My co-workers are my co-workers. My family is my family. The dude I met the other day at a networking event is just a dude I might want to keep in touch with. None of these people are my "friends".
"How long before the millions of people who have piled into Facebook stop checking their profiles every day or, for that matter, every week."
I think that Mr Evans is underestimating the human appetite for gossip. The reason people like facebook so much is not because of its novelty; if that were the case, with the average net user's attention span, the novelty would have worn out by now. The real reason is that seemingly trivial information about people you actually know is exciting to members of a species evolved to live in groups and use gossip as a means of establishing, assessing and maintaining relationships.
Also, I cannot resist the urge to play grammar police. Phenomenon.
The author brings up good points. As for as social networks go, I think Facebook has a significantly higher chance of surviving than Myspace, but I suppose that is still no guarantee of continued success. Will be interesting to see what happens over the next 5 years.
Facebook has a lot of smart people behind it. If these are five things that will definitely kill Facebook, you can be sure that Facebook won't be sitting on these five things for long.
I don't see Facebook staying as just a social network for very long, just as Google isn't just search (not that I'm comparing the two just yet).
