It could be a number of things. Right now, there's a danger that people start thinking of Facebook as the company that's good for status updates and photos. T

It could be a number of things. Right now, there's a danger that people start thinking of Facebook as the company that's good for status updates and photos. That might prove to be a long term facet of our lives, but it could also prove to be fleeting. Another example of this could be users thinking of Google as that search company and ignoring the company's attempts at other products. There's lots of ways to take social software, but there's a potential that people will popularly think of Facebook as the status message and friend-tagged photo company. Facebook's barrier to entry (its closed social graph) is both its strongest asset and its greatest weakness. A barrier to entry like this means that most of your competition is gone. You can get used to having very limited, if any, competition because if someone's 20% or 50% better than you are, the barrier to entry slaps them down and maybe you even buy them and incorporate them into you on the cheap. But then someone comes along who is a genius and changes things and shoots the moon. A bit of a comparison here could be Microsoft. Apple was weak for a long time. The Win32 API was a huge barrier to entry. Then a lot of forces conspired to really break Microsoft. The rise of the platform-independent web (with Google, Apple, Mozilla, open-source, and others), Apple's resurgence (where they took Microsoft by surprise on handhelds and might have even sent Windows Mobile to the annals of history), and just the changing landscape. I mean, I remember a time when I thought my Mac would always feel like an also-ran platform unless Microsoft was forced to open up the Win32 API. Nowadays, I don't think any of us Mac users feel like we're on an also-ran platform (at least not in the way it felt years ago). People's tastes might change. Right now, people want a connected, low-privacy social graph. In 10 years, we might feel different. People's preferences change. Facebook might become generationally limited. A lot of us got on Facebook in college. I remember when you could list your courses and find people in your classes. Some non-Facebook company might hit critical mass in a different generation of users who might see Facebook as lame because their parents are on it. Those are a few that came to my mind. I'm not saying that Facebook can't rise to the challenges. They've shown themselves to be quite an adept company. However, it's hard to predict the future and social networking is something that everyone seems to be gunning for. Others are trying to out-maneuver Facebook and users can be fickle.