11 ms·

It has been said many times, that something else will come around, become more popular, and overthrow facebook. I just don't see that happening now. They're st

It has been said many times, that something else will come around, become more popular, and overthrow facebook. I just don't see that happening now. They're still doing well. They bought Instagram. (I think a very smart move.) They'll eventually buy the next big thing. I think Facebook is here to stay.

kuschku 10y ago
> They'll eventually buy the next big thing. Unless the next big thing refuses to do so.
- vthallam 10y ago
  Well yes, Snapchat refused and is the only non FB mobile app in top 5 social i guess.
- AJ007 10y ago
  As Snapchat has. The big strength Facebook has now is very similar to Google's. They can rake in cash without having to spend a bunch of money to generate it. Unlike Apple they don't need to produce extremely polished and innovate hardware every single year. Secondly it was very difficult for any other party to aggregate as many advertisers as Google had; Facebook pulled it off but it took a long time. Someone else may be able to do that too, but once virtually all ad revenue is digital there will be plenty of room for a third participant. There are other business models, but the ad revenue one allows companies to really laser focus on just growing and keeping their marketshare. AI and post-mobile platforms are going to change things in ways investors aren't predicting. Facebook knows this and they certainly are demonstrating it, between wit.ai/messengers "bots" and Oculus. This larger generational shift may well open up gaps that directly threaten Google's core model more so than Facebook's.
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    Too bad Snapchat is also turning into a tabloid
    - Yhippa 10y ago
      Mystery meat features is kind of cool but kind of annoying at the same time.
    - angryasian 10y ago
      Agree, I think this is a problem with Snapchat being a LA company vs a Valley company. They want to be a media company rather than a technology company.
      - chridal 10y ago
        Might we see Snapchat turning into a Yahoo instead of a Google?
    - quotemstr 10y ago
      Why do you think that is?
      - cloudjacker 10y ago
        because they found they could sell space in the app to media companies who are FOMOing at the mouth.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Is snapchat setting up to be the next facebook or the next groupon?
- mtgx 10y ago
  Also, they can only afford to use so much "funny money" (inflated stock) for the next company they'll have to pay $20 billion to buy.
brianstorms 10y ago
It will happen. Facebook is not forever. Nor is Google. Nor is Apple.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  See IBM and Microsoft whose market caps both collapsed after they lost control of their respective markets. Oh, wait...
  - ChrisLTD 10y ago
    To be fair, IBM and Microsoft are very different companies now. Maybe Facebook becomes the VR company and not the social media company?
  - acchow 10y ago
    MSFT had >$600 billion market cap in 1999.
    - scholia 10y ago
      There was a bubble....
  - refurb 10y ago
    "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    You can see how IBM is putting a lot of money into (ads for) their "cognitive computing" stuff (probably crappier and more expensive than the competition) They're pretty much drifting into irrelevance each passing day. But enough to fool some people into giving them money
hacker_9 10y ago
Facebook managed to beat out it's competitors to the top spot, and maintain that spot long enough to the point where it has just become a constant in people's minds now. Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. There was that Diaspora that gave users privacy, only to find people didn't care about that (the majority). Then there was Google+, who again introduced a whole lot of lingo and looked complicated to use and why bother? Everyone's on Facebook after all, and Google = Search, everything else is just riff raff! Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'. Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.
- anonymousguy 10y ago
  > Everyone's on Facebook after all I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.
  - vadym909 10y ago
    >waste their time with Facebook That's a bold statement. People like me use it as a lightweight option to stay abreast with whats going on with friends and family without having to invest in a long call or email. You may think I don't care, but I do- but its hard and time consuming to call 50 people and ask 'Did you go somewhere this summer? How was it? What did you see?'. Instead I just 'like' when I see a cool picture they share and when I call them I can start by saying 'Wow- you had such a good time in Paris- why don't you visit us next year?'
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10y ago
Olscore 10y ago
> I think Facebook is here to stay. Well, that just sounds like an open invitation to challenge them.
- randiantech 10y ago
  Or a correct read of reality. Facebook is here to stay because theres not a single social network that could compete with it right now.
bartozone 10y ago
Not just Instagram, but Occulus Rift, and WhatsApp. They aren't afraid to spend for leaders in an area they aren't as strong in. They are a very exciting company that could see massive growth over the next 5 - 10 years as they become more than just the newsfeed people know them for.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  yeah the Instagram buyout was a genius move...in retrospect the $1 billion was a bargain. Whatsapp keeps growing, although $18 billion still seems like a lot, but I think they will find a way to monetize it better. Facebook can't do wrong it seems. Like Google in 2005..and they keep doing better than ever too.
  - adventured 10y ago
    Interestingly, $700m of that purchase was in stock, with that stock now being worth about $3.2 billion after tomorrow's (assumed) price jump. That's going off of Dealbook's Facebook valuation tracker back in early 2012. Who knows of course how much of that stock was held on to up to this point, I suspect some made out extraordinarily well by keeping it.
- scient 10y ago
  vive is blowing them out of the water currently with VR though, and Palmer is not improving the situation at all with his antics.
zghst 10y ago
Facebook, I think, will be one of the defining companies of this century, all built around improving the human network. This company has nowhere but up to go
- paulpauper 10y ago
  agree. facebook, amazon, and google..three companies to rule the world. Investing in these stocks is like investing in the companies that are building the the matrix, unfolding in real life before our eyes.
  - eru 10y ago
    What was your opinion of Microsoft in the 90s?
- cel1ne 10y ago
  Right now social media with their filter bubble, their megaphone and negativity-emission is anything but improving the human network. I think they will learn and make things better for mankind, but they need to realise that just throwing mass-communication onto people won't fix things by itself. "Release often, release early" is not good when it comes to emotional communication.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I find it interesting that Facebook is slowly starving Google of advertising revenue. Google has been singularly unsuccessful at developing a business outside of their search advertising business that makes them the sort of margins they need. In my opinion Google is sacrificing their own search product[1] on the altar of staying alive looking for an answer that works. The challenge with that strategy is that a company that doesn't need search advertising to stay alive will have the freedom to compete with Google in terms of quality user experience. One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that? I can imagine a Facebook search product with the accuracy and reach of Google's but without the crappy pages that nobody really cares about anyway. With 15 - 30% margins instead of 80+% margins. I remember watching IBM fade in the 1990's. It wasn't pretty and for as long as I could remember up to that point it had been the biggest fish in a very big market. The gorilla as some would say. I watched as an alliance of Microsoft and Intel decimated the retail business, Sun, HP, and later Dell decimated the server business. Nobody who mattered really thought IBM was dying or even threatened. Google won by making Google a destination in every web browser, and Facebook is winning by making Facebook the destination on everyone's phone. And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading. Something will come along and derail Facebook but it won't be another social network. It will be something which changes a fundamental part of people behavior and interaction with their world. [1] And to be clear it is creating a backlash by attempting to monetize so heavily the user experience is compromised as are the search results.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  What's your search engine of choice, Google? DDG? Something else?
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    What ever the box gives me. (which is part of the problem) On my Surface Book, not surprisingly, lots of things end up going to Bing. My Firefox address box went to Yahoo! (which was really filled in by Bing) for a while, which was fine. Chrome of course tries really hard to only go to Google. The challenge is that both Bing and Google give adequate results, and slowly over time Google has gotten more and more annoying when they detect I'm looking for something to buy (which really lights up the page with about 95% non-organic content). Bing is bad too but oddly, less bad.
freyir 10y ago
> It has been said many times, that something else will come around ... I think Facebook is here to stay. Now that we've decided Facebook is here to stay, it's soon to be overthrown. Initially, people expected Facebook to be replaced by a better looking or more exclusive version of Facebook (the way Facebook was a better looking and more exclusive version of MySpace). That never came to pass. The next big threat was the shift to mobile. Mobile was a huge window of opportunity for potential competitors, because Facebook's itself made a slow transition to mobile. Facebook staved this off by identifying and acquiring threats (Instagram, WhatsApp, and a bid for Snapchat). Its biggest threat remains the emergence of a new platform. I imagine that's why Zuckerberg made such a big gamble on VR; if VR could possibly be the next platform, he felt he needed to own it. It's starting to look like consumer demand for VR was way oversold, but maybe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Another possibility is people will simply gradually lose interest in Facebook/Instagram. I deleted FB years ago and can't imagine going back, but apparently I'm not part of a bigger trend in this regard.
- dpiers 10y ago
  I don't think consumer interest in VR was oversold. The current options are doing quite well in the early adopter space, and I think we're on track for mass adoption in 5-10 years. Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched. Only a few people had the Internet in 1991. VR has only been in consumer hands for a few months.
  - freyir 10y ago
    > I don't think consumer interest in VR was oversold. Some companies and people had very unrealistic expectations about VR when they entered the space. 5-10 years seems like a realistic timeline for potential mass adoption. > Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched Only a few people had 3D TVs and Segways when they first launched. Unlike the iPhone, only a few people ever had the EyePhone [1]. It remains a question whether a critical mass of people will want VR. I've witnessed many people experiencing VR where it's like "Wow, this is totally amazing" for the first five minutes, followed by complete disinterest after 15 minutes. I think that suggests that there's something there, but there are also some barriers that haven't been identified and addressed yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research#The_EyePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research#The_EyePhone
reddog 10y ago
Could the Justice Department end the party? Or is a monopoly built on the network effect exempt from antitrust laws?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  It's not (just) how you build it. It's what you do with it / how you use it.
austinl 10y ago
And even if Facebook itself saw a decline, the business could still be quite successful from their properties alone. Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp – all quite valuable, not to mention other standalone products within Facebook like Messenger (that just crossed 1 billion MAUs).
paulpauper 10y ago
it's going to be worth $1 trillion...the question is within this decade or longer like 30 years. People thought something would replace Microsoft...30 years later Windows and World still more dominant than ever
- Retric 10y ago
  Windows is closer to irrelevant now than ever before. Many people use non windows tablets and phones far more than desktops. Some websites see far more non desktop users than desktop users so arguably their market share is under 50%.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    People have been boldly stating the irrelevance of windows since before '95 and somehow it just...keeps...ignoring them.
  - paulpauper 10y ago
    but it look like 30 years for Microsoft to become slightly less relevant . Microsoft business has evolved substantially beyond windows though.
  - randiantech 10y ago
    'Closer to irrelevant' is a bold statement to say. Windows is strong, not as strong as in the 90's where it was the only consumer oriented OS, but is far, far away from being 'irrelevant'.
    - Retric 10y ago
      With more than four times as many android phones being sold than Windows machines it's not as far fetched as you might think. For a more direct comparison Windows phone has 5% of iOS market share and 1% of Androids. Most major software news is off Windows Instagram and Pokemon Go for example really don't care about the desktop. The web got good enough that many services are native on mobile and Windoes just gets a website.
Retric 10y ago
Myspace is irrelevant, but not quite dead yet. Facebook like IBM is going to stick around in one form or another for a long time. Their real risk is maximizing profit may not be the same as maintaining dominance, so they may slowly kill off their service over 10+ profitable followed by a slow decline. And really Facebooks main problem is they have so many users they can't really grow revenue by adding more. Which means revenue growth is generally going to drive people away.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  They don't need more users...they are able to keep growing advertising revenue by filling more slots, finding new advertising venues such as Instagram, and through higher bids.
__b__ 10y ago
Like AOL. Yes, I agree!
mahyarm 10y ago
I have a feeling that snapchat is their biggest threat. It offered something that facebook doesn't: a lack of a practical record. Now it is slowly evolving into video twitter & personal news feeds. I can see it eventually adopting the rest of the functions that facebook has today. Recently they've added permanence with memories. Memories although give personal control and still prevent a bunch of problems of people seeing "the wrong facebook updates"

kuschku 10y ago

> They'll eventually buy the next big thing. Unless the next big thing refuses to do so.

vthallam 10y ago
Well yes, Snapchat refused and is the only non FB mobile app in top 5 social i guess.
AJ007 10y ago
As Snapchat has. The big strength Facebook has now is very similar to Google's. They can rake in cash without having to spend a bunch of money to generate it. Unlike Apple they don't need to produce extremely polished and innovate hardware every single year. Secondly it was very difficult for any other party to aggregate as many advertisers as Google had; Facebook pulled it off but it took a long time. Someone else may be able to do that too, but once virtually all ad revenue is digital there will be plenty of room for a third participant. There are other business models, but the ad revenue one allows companies to really laser focus on just growing and keeping their marketshare. AI and post-mobile platforms are going to change things in ways investors aren't predicting. Facebook knows this and they certainly are demonstrating it, between wit.ai/messengers "bots" and Oculus. This larger generational shift may well open up gaps that directly threaten Google's core model more so than Facebook's.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  Too bad Snapchat is also turning into a tabloid
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    Mystery meat features is kind of cool but kind of annoying at the same time.
  - angryasian 10y ago
    Agree, I think this is a problem with Snapchat being a LA company vs a Valley company. They want to be a media company rather than a technology company.
    - chridal 10y ago
      Might we see Snapchat turning into a Yahoo instead of a Google?
  - quotemstr 10y ago
    Why do you think that is?
    - cloudjacker 10y ago
      because they found they could sell space in the app to media companies who are FOMOing at the mouth.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Is snapchat setting up to be the next facebook or the next groupon?
mtgx 10y ago
Also, they can only afford to use so much "funny money" (inflated stock) for the next company they'll have to pay $20 billion to buy.

brianstorms 10y ago

It will happen. Facebook is not forever. Nor is Google. Nor is Apple.

erikpukinskis 10y ago
See IBM and Microsoft whose market caps both collapsed after they lost control of their respective markets. Oh, wait...
- ChrisLTD 10y ago
  To be fair, IBM and Microsoft are very different companies now. Maybe Facebook becomes the VR company and not the social media company?
- acchow 10y ago
  MSFT had >$600 billion market cap in 1999.
  - scholia 10y ago
    There was a bubble....
- refurb 10y ago
  "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
- raverbashing 10y ago
  You can see how IBM is putting a lot of money into (ads for) their "cognitive computing" stuff (probably crappier and more expensive than the competition) They're pretty much drifting into irrelevance each passing day. But enough to fool some people into giving them money

hacker_9 10y ago

Facebook managed to beat out it's competitors to the top spot, and maintain that spot long enough to the point where it has just become a constant in people's minds now. Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. There was that Diaspora that gave users privacy, only to find people didn't care about that (the majority). Then there was Google+, who again introduced a whole lot of lingo and looked complicated to use and why bother? Everyone's on Facebook after all, and Google = Search, everything else is just riff raff! Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'. Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.

anonymousguy 10y ago
> Everyone's on Facebook after all I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.
- vadym909 10y ago
  >waste their time with Facebook That's a bold statement. People like me use it as a lightweight option to stay abreast with whats going on with friends and family without having to invest in a long call or email. You may think I don't care, but I do- but its hard and time consuming to call 50 people and ask 'Did you go somewhere this summer? How was it? What did you see?'. Instead I just 'like' when I see a cool picture they share and when I call them I can start by saying 'Wow- you had such a good time in Paris- why don't you visit us next year?'
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 10y ago

Olscore 10y ago

> I think Facebook is here to stay. Well, that just sounds like an open invitation to challenge them.

randiantech 10y ago
Or a correct read of reality. Facebook is here to stay because theres not a single social network that could compete with it right now.

bartozone 10y ago

Not just Instagram, but Occulus Rift, and WhatsApp. They aren't afraid to spend for leaders in an area they aren't as strong in. They are a very exciting company that could see massive growth over the next 5 - 10 years as they become more than just the newsfeed people know them for.

paulpauper 10y ago
yeah the Instagram buyout was a genius move...in retrospect the $1 billion was a bargain. Whatsapp keeps growing, although $18 billion still seems like a lot, but I think they will find a way to monetize it better. Facebook can't do wrong it seems. Like Google in 2005..and they keep doing better than ever too.
- adventured 10y ago
  Interestingly, $700m of that purchase was in stock, with that stock now being worth about $3.2 billion after tomorrow's (assumed) price jump. That's going off of Dealbook's Facebook valuation tracker back in early 2012. Who knows of course how much of that stock was held on to up to this point, I suspect some made out extraordinarily well by keeping it.
scient 10y ago
vive is blowing them out of the water currently with VR though, and Palmer is not improving the situation at all with his antics.

zghst 10y ago

Facebook, I think, will be one of the defining companies of this century, all built around improving the human network. This company has nowhere but up to go

paulpauper 10y ago
agree. facebook, amazon, and google..three companies to rule the world. Investing in these stocks is like investing in the companies that are building the the matrix, unfolding in real life before our eyes.
- eru 10y ago
  What was your opinion of Microsoft in the 90s?
cel1ne 10y ago
Right now social media with their filter bubble, their megaphone and negativity-emission is anything but improving the human network. I think they will learn and make things better for mankind, but they need to realise that just throwing mass-communication onto people won't fix things by itself. "Release often, release early" is not good when it comes to emotional communication.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I find it interesting that Facebook is slowly starving Google of advertising revenue. Google has been singularly unsuccessful at developing a business outside of their search advertising business that makes them the sort of margins they need. In my opinion Google is sacrificing their own search product[1] on the altar of staying alive looking for an answer that works. The challenge with that strategy is that a company that doesn't need search advertising to stay alive will have the freedom to compete with Google in terms of quality user experience. One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that? I can imagine a Facebook search product with the accuracy and reach of Google's but without the crappy pages that nobody really cares about anyway. With 15 - 30% margins instead of 80+% margins. I remember watching IBM fade in the 1990's. It wasn't pretty and for as long as I could remember up to that point it had been the biggest fish in a very big market. The gorilla as some would say. I watched as an alliance of Microsoft and Intel decimated the retail business, Sun, HP, and later Dell decimated the server business. Nobody who mattered really thought IBM was dying or even threatened. Google won by making Google a destination in every web browser, and Facebook is winning by making Facebook the destination on everyone's phone. And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading. Something will come along and derail Facebook but it won't be another social network. It will be something which changes a fundamental part of people behavior and interaction with their world. [1] And to be clear it is creating a backlash by attempting to monetize so heavily the user experience is compromised as are the search results.

Yhippa 10y ago
What's your search engine of choice, Google? DDG? Something else?
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  What ever the box gives me. (which is part of the problem) On my Surface Book, not surprisingly, lots of things end up going to Bing. My Firefox address box went to Yahoo! (which was really filled in by Bing) for a while, which was fine. Chrome of course tries really hard to only go to Google. The challenge is that both Bing and Google give adequate results, and slowly over time Google has gotten more and more annoying when they detect I'm looking for something to buy (which really lights up the page with about 95% non-organic content). Bing is bad too but oddly, less bad.

freyir 10y ago

> It has been said many times, that something else will come around ... I think Facebook is here to stay. Now that we've decided Facebook is here to stay, it's soon to be overthrown. Initially, people expected Facebook to be replaced by a better looking or more exclusive version of Facebook (the way Facebook was a better looking and more exclusive version of MySpace). That never came to pass. The next big threat was the shift to mobile. Mobile was a huge window of opportunity for potential competitors, because Facebook's itself made a slow transition to mobile. Facebook staved this off by identifying and acquiring threats (Instagram, WhatsApp, and a bid for Snapchat). Its biggest threat remains the emergence of a new platform. I imagine that's why Zuckerberg made such a big gamble on VR; if VR could possibly be the next platform, he felt he needed to own it. It's starting to look like consumer demand for VR was way oversold, but maybe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Another possibility is people will simply gradually lose interest in Facebook/Instagram. I deleted FB years ago and can't imagine going back, but apparently I'm not part of a bigger trend in this regard.

dpiers 10y ago
I don't think consumer interest in VR was oversold. The current options are doing quite well in the early adopter space, and I think we're on track for mass adoption in 5-10 years. Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched. Only a few people had the Internet in 1991. VR has only been in consumer hands for a few months.
- freyir 10y ago
  > I don't think consumer interest in VR was oversold. Some companies and people had very unrealistic expectations about VR when they entered the space. 5-10 years seems like a realistic timeline for potential mass adoption. > Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched Only a few people had 3D TVs and Segways when they first launched. Unlike the iPhone, only a few people ever had the EyePhone [1]. It remains a question whether a critical mass of people will want VR. I've witnessed many people experiencing VR where it's like "Wow, this is totally amazing" for the first five minutes, followed by complete disinterest after 15 minutes. I think that suggests that there's something there, but there are also some barriers that haven't been identified and addressed yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research#The_EyePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research#The_EyePhone

reddog 10y ago

Could the Justice Department end the party? Or is a monopoly built on the network effect exempt from antitrust laws?

dredmorbius 10y ago
It's not (just) how you build it. It's what you do with it / how you use it.

austinl 10y ago

And even if Facebook itself saw a decline, the business could still be quite successful from their properties alone. Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp – all quite valuable, not to mention other standalone products within Facebook like Messenger (that just crossed 1 billion MAUs).

paulpauper 10y ago

it's going to be worth $1 trillion...the question is within this decade or longer like 30 years. People thought something would replace Microsoft...30 years later Windows and World still more dominant than ever

Retric 10y ago
Windows is closer to irrelevant now than ever before. Many people use non windows tablets and phones far more than desktops. Some websites see far more non desktop users than desktop users so arguably their market share is under 50%.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  People have been boldly stating the irrelevance of windows since before '95 and somehow it just...keeps...ignoring them.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  but it look like 30 years for Microsoft to become slightly less relevant . Microsoft business has evolved substantially beyond windows though.
- randiantech 10y ago
  'Closer to irrelevant' is a bold statement to say. Windows is strong, not as strong as in the 90's where it was the only consumer oriented OS, but is far, far away from being 'irrelevant'.
  - Retric 10y ago
    With more than four times as many android phones being sold than Windows machines it's not as far fetched as you might think. For a more direct comparison Windows phone has 5% of iOS market share and 1% of Androids. Most major software news is off Windows Instagram and Pokemon Go for example really don't care about the desktop. The web got good enough that many services are native on mobile and Windoes just gets a website.

Retric 10y ago

Myspace is irrelevant, but not quite dead yet. Facebook like IBM is going to stick around in one form or another for a long time. Their real risk is maximizing profit may not be the same as maintaining dominance, so they may slowly kill off their service over 10+ profitable followed by a slow decline. And really Facebooks main problem is they have so many users they can't really grow revenue by adding more. Which means revenue growth is generally going to drive people away.

paulpauper 10y ago
They don't need more users...they are able to keep growing advertising revenue by filling more slots, finding new advertising venues such as Instagram, and through higher bids.

__b__ 10y ago

Like AOL. Yes, I agree!

mahyarm 10y ago

I have a feeling that snapchat is their biggest threat. It offered something that facebook doesn't: a lack of a practical record. Now it is slowly evolving into video twitter & personal news feeds. I can see it eventually adopting the rest of the functions that facebook has today. Recently they've added permanence with memories. Memories although give personal control and still prevent a bunch of problems of people seeing "the wrong facebook updates"