According to your "everything dies soon" model, Google never should have made it to the earning billions of dollars stage, though. Facebook is a much newer company than Google - but it's on the same general path in terms of philosophy and style. And it's already much more engrained in people than Google ever was. It's extremely easy to switch search engines - it's not easy at all to switch social networking sites because you'd have to take all your friends with you.
Google isn't a social networking site.... I was strictly speaking SOCIAL NETWORKING... I don't know how you can compare search engines to social networking sites..... How do you get tired of a search engine? You don't. You're not spending hours and hours on a search engine every day of the week. A search engine is a search engine, it gives you the same features and some search engines give you different results as opposed to others. IMO, Facebook is something you can get tired of after years and years of having an account for, and that's what I'm going by. Feel free to disagree, but I just wanted to make it clear why I was saying what I was saying.
This is the only reason I like about Facebook. And when I hear ANYONE talking about their Facebook page, I want to slap them. Especially men. No one cares about the conversation you had with someone else on Facebook. Facebook is not going anywhere. If you see how many kids (high schoolers for the most part) use it today, and how they use it it's disgusting. They are growing up with it from a young age. It's like at 16 you can open a Facebook page, at 18 can you drive/smoke, and at 21 you can gamble. By the time kids turn 16, they see a lot of their friends using it, so they decide they might as well too. I knew what Myspace was about from the start - hooking up with people - so I never bothered with it. The reason why I say Facebook and the BBS are similar is because it is. Except the BBS is everything right with internet socializing and Facebook does it wrong. I decided not to add pics and delete it in the end because it was all or nothing. Either I was gonna add pics and check it at least once a day like everyone else, or stop using it. I chose the later because I don't want to end up like many Facebook users. With the BBS, people are not focused on popularity.
OK, where is the evidence that everything dies in social networking? The space is all of about a few years old. You've had 3 major players (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter) and one minor player (Friendster). 2 of the 4 are alive and kicking, 1 is struggling, and 1 is dead. You don't get tired of a search engine, but they should be easier to kill. There's no inherent value in them - once a better one comes along, there's no reason to use the older one. That's how Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask, and all the other many dozens of search sites got killed by Google. With social networking, there's much more effort required to overtake the leader. Social networking as a whole could certainly die as a fad. However, the established leaders (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) will be hard to just replace with a better option and get widespread acceptance. Google is learning this with their attempts at Buzz.
Except the purposes of the two are entirely different. The purpose of a BBS is to interact with people who you don't know but have common interests. Facebook's purpose is to interact with people you do know, often about non-common interests. They aren't meant to serve the same audience, needs, or goals.
I would count AOL as social networking.... for years... that was the "thing" when it came to communication and talking to friends, etc. That also died. Yeah it will be hard to replace a Facebook or a Twitter, but are you saying that you can't see anything being built remotely better than a Facebook sometime in the next 5-10 years that could take over? I just see something coming up that will over take it... but it would be something different. Google made Buzz like a simple integrated twitter in your email. They know they can't compete with Twitter or Facebook, hell... that's why they integrated Buzz with Twitter. I'm talking about a bigger competition... something more serious, something different. I could be wrong, but that's just what I think. I'm not going to bother with this child.
Did AOL chat die? I never used it personally, but sitting in giant 500+ people lecture halls, I see plenty of kids still using it.
Come on man... we all know it's not what it used to be. AIM isn't used that widely anymore, at least not as it was back in the day when AOL got popular.
I literally still see hundreds of college students using it in classes. If you walk in a college lecture hall, you see almost every student with their facebook up and aim in the corner. i never used it, but to me, it looks like people still use it. But i just use facebook chat
People use it... I'm not saying it's completely dead... It's just not what it used to be. I still use it though.
I don't think chat is the same as social networking. There are tons of chat clients, going from well before AIM came around. Chat clients are easy to replace because you can use multiple ones - there's no investment except downloading the software, so you can have AIM, MSNIM, and GChat and then pick whichever more people are using. You don't really join two facebook-type sites and put a lot of effort into both. Sorry - I didn't mean to imply it's impossible. It certainly could happen. My only point is that Facebook has a lot of inertia behind it that something like Myspace never had. I used to run a web gaming company, and the key principle to all of it is not the quality of the game, but the addictive properties within. They are little subtle things that most players don't even notice, but it's the key to hooking people. Facebook has a lot of those things in it - it's very subtle, but it does a very good job of locking people. There's no doubt a new generation of stuff can come into the market, but the initial adoption will be substantially more difficult than getting Myspace people to adopt Facebook was because MySpace did a terrible job in that behind-the-scenes side of things. One very simple, basic example is that you don't need a MySpace account to view a MySpace page. Anyone can see it without making their own commitment. If you want to see someone's Facebook page, you have to join and become part of the community. That minor detail sucks people in - even people who didn't intend to become active Facebook members. It's subtle things that like on the business side that gives Facebook the staying power it has.
Your argument is valid. I agree in many respects. But the problem with Facebook, is the model isn't really profitable at this point. Same with Twitter, Digg and the likes. I can see these things falling off if they start implementing pay services to generate shareholder revenue (when they eventually go public or when they are bought out by a public company).
I see what you mean... For now it's still at it's peak... we'll just have to wait and see if anything creative is made.
My understanding is that Facebook finally became profitable sometime last year, but I'm not positive. With their ability to target ads, they should not have any problem moving to sustainable profitability though. They haven't really exploited their ad model at all yet, but when they do, I think it has the ability to rival Google's because they know so much about their individual audience members. You can charge an enormous premium for that kind of targeting. Once the ad market comes back to life post-recession, they should really benefit. I agree on Twitter - I also think it's lacking in a lot of those addictive properties that Facebook does well. I can very well see Twitter ultimately becoming a fad - in part because of the lack of privacy (an issue that hurt MySpace) and the limited ability to really interact on a deeper basis. They are certainly stronger than MySpace, but I would put them a tier below Facebook in terms of underly business potential. How they monetize themselves and how it affects their business will be interesting to see.
