What target audience? Doesn't everyone and their mom use Facebook now, pretty much? Seems to me its biggest competitor for attention is TV. To me this stuff

What target audience? Doesn't everyone and their mom use Facebook now, pretty much? Seems to me its biggest competitor for attention is TV. To me this stuff is fairly simple - but I don't use Facebook anymore fwiw. There were a bunch of prior attempts at large scale social networking like this and they pretty much all ran into issues with scaling. Facebook handled this adeptly, plus they didn't allow their user-base to turn into a total cesspool through ridiculous customizations + features that made it act like a hookup service ala MySpace, which is why they ate their lunch. Now the network effects are extreme with nearly a billion served - so it's not exactly hard to keep users' attention when most of their friends and family use the service as well. And I haven't seen any viable competitors come across except Google+ which doesn't seem to be a real threat. So I'm not sure who exactly is nipping at their heels unless we're thinking of a different way of attacking social ala Pinterest (and formerly Instagram :)... which I think is what it will take. You won't outdo them by being a better them. It seems to me most of their innovation has been in a way to set up better ways to monetize or lock in their mass of user data.