Diaspora's an interesting contender, though I doubt it can beat facebook's mom/grandma-friendly ease of use. Facebook is pretty smart, mind you, but they do nee

Diaspora's an interesting contender, though I doubt it can beat facebook's mom/grandma-friendly ease of use. Facebook is pretty smart, mind you, but they do need to pick up the pace on mobile (maybe, they'll buy Loopt as they should anyways). It would be very funny to see the next big startup beating facebook using facebook's Open Source tools. I mean, to scale that high, you would be silly not to. After all, Diaspora's betting on MongoDB (wonder why they didn't go with Cassandra, hmm? :-p) As about the future, facebook will continue to make the web facebookable, the "Like" is only the beginning. I wouldn't be surprised if facebook integrated loopt to make real places "Like"able and have check in's as a core feature. facebook sign-in will continue to have more impact and it's likely that facebook may even dominate commenting using a Disqus like approach.