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I expect the Internet and social media is going to continue to evolve and blow past what Facebook was able to accomplish faster than anyone thinks. I don't exp

I expect the Internet and social media is going to continue to evolve and blow past what Facebook was able to accomplish faster than anyone thinks. I don't expect Facebook will last as the largest social network for much more than 5 years. And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1 million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality.

jseliger 14y ago
And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1 million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality. It's possible, but the alternate hypothesis is that Facebook now has a sufficient number of users that network effects will keep those users locked in, provided that the company itself doesn't do anything ridiculously stupid. Which will happen? I have no idea: the future is hard. But a plausible story can be spun in either direction.
PommeDeTerre 14y ago
We're already a few decades past the point that you've described. Email has been the biggest social network for a long time, dwarfing Facebook and any of its competitors. Basically all Facebook users have at least one email account. Then there are all of the people who don't use Facebook, yet still use email. That's a lot of people! Also, that's really only just considering personal email usage, too. Many of those people, whether or not they use Facebook, use email as part of their jobs. Maybe Facebook or some other mechanism will catch up with email at some point, but that's looking very unlikely.
- dj2stein9 14y ago
  The email "problem" is what Facebook fixed. Email is broken for a lot of reasons. Managing your contacts, finding lost contacts, finding the email of that person you met last night, party planning, birthday reminders, attachments, sharing photos with groups of people.... There are a lot of things that are extremely difficult to do with email, but are very easy to do on Facebook. So I consider Facebook to be simply a better email client for communicating with your friends and family. A next-generation email/facebook/social system will have to take things to the next level, and integrated with your phone, and perhaps even replace the conventional cell phone carriers completely.

jseliger 14y ago

And the reason is simple, it only took Facebook that long to go from 1 million to 1 billion users. It's successor will probably be able to do it in half that time. I bet we're only a couple years away from that eventuality. It's possible, but the alternate hypothesis is that Facebook now has a sufficient number of users that network effects will keep those users locked in, provided that the company itself doesn't do anything ridiculously stupid. Which will happen? I have no idea: the future is hard. But a plausible story can be spun in either direction.

PommeDeTerre 14y ago

We're already a few decades past the point that you've described. Email has been the biggest social network for a long time, dwarfing Facebook and any of its competitors. Basically all Facebook users have at least one email account. Then there are all of the people who don't use Facebook, yet still use email. That's a lot of people! Also, that's really only just considering personal email usage, too. Many of those people, whether or not they use Facebook, use email as part of their jobs. Maybe Facebook or some other mechanism will catch up with email at some point, but that's looking very unlikely.

dj2stein9 14y ago
The email "problem" is what Facebook fixed. Email is broken for a lot of reasons. Managing your contacts, finding lost contacts, finding the email of that person you met last night, party planning, birthday reminders, attachments, sharing photos with groups of people.... There are a lot of things that are extremely difficult to do with email, but are very easy to do on Facebook. So I consider Facebook to be simply a better email client for communicating with your friends and family. A next-generation email/facebook/social system will have to take things to the next level, and integrated with your phone, and perhaps even replace the conventional cell phone carriers completely.