Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.
I suspect that is what will happen. Going off on a tangent, the idea comes to me that perhaps some sort of meta-Facebook site might appear in the future that will be to the children of today what Facebook is to the "oldsters".
We join Facebook and encounter old friends and old photographs posted by old friends. Maybe they will join meta-Facebook and find old profiles of old friends that link to their own old profiles.
What, out of curiosity, would prompt them to leave a service that all their friends use? There needs to be something so useful that I'll join a new site and leave behind all my old friends. I don't see that happening with Facebook.
Hmm, like the quote says, remember Friendster? Anyway, the same things that prompt all of us to drift apart from old friends, I should think. New friends and social circles, different lifestyles, different jobs, different priorities, different interests, etc. The same things happen online. I'm sure many people have irc channels/forums/games/sites they used to visit daily and members from that site they used to confide their deepest secrets to. I know I have. Now they're all no longer a part of my life.
I used to visit Facebook daily too, but I've mostly stopped visiting it, except when someone uses it to send me event invitations or someone tells me to go view pictures there. For everything else, there's IM. The thing is, if someone is really a friend of mine, then I don't need Facebook to stay in touch with them. If not, then I don't need to stay in touch with them, so sites like Facebook really had no intrinsic draw for me besides novelty or perhaps a business opportunity.
Now my main guilty pleasure is HN, and none of my friends are here. Then again, I am a bit of a loner, so this could just reflect my own atypical usage patterns and you could well be right in that most people will use Facebook for the rest of their lives. I doubt it though. I don't think Facebook addresses a need as fundamental as Google does.
I use facebook for showing my twitter updates (as most of my friends don't use twitter), showing my google reader shares (as most of my friends don't have google reader) and for event planning. The ability to easily share videos and photos also helps greatly. My last couple of birthdays were a little different and people took a little convincing. The hardest one was convincing people to buy into throwies, as you're "throwing money" around the city. Facebook make that possible without having to convince every single person myself. Once I got a group going they were convincing each other. And yes, everyone had a lot of fun. =)
I suspect that is what will happen. Going off on a tangent, the idea comes to me that perhaps some sort of meta-Facebook site might appear in the future that will be to the children of today what Facebook is to the "oldsters".
We join Facebook and encounter old friends and old photographs posted by old friends. Maybe they will join meta-Facebook and find old profiles of old friends that link to their own old profiles.