You're conflating facebook with social networking. We've had social networking since before the internet was created, and one of the first things to have been

You're conflating facebook with social networking. We've had social networking since before the internet was created, and one of the first things to have been done on the internet was social networking (message boards, email, instant messaging, etc). Facebook is simply one implementation of social networking. There were others, and are still others. For example, email, instant messaging, forums, still exist, as well as new stuff like Pinterest, tumblr, twitter. Facebook's size is due to network effects, not necessarily because a company like Google is incapable of technically matching facebook's product, or because facebook is dominating with its product. For example, Google was able to grab over 50% of the smartphone market share when it focused its efforts on Android. But, it basically has an insignificant share of the social networking market with Google Plus. Why? It's probably because social networking is more winner-take-all. But this doesn't mean Facebook has won, as the barriers to entry for creating the technical product of a social network is simple. This means facebook has limited control of its users. We grant facebook the monopoly, and it really has limited opportunity to screw us or extract money from us, for once they go over the line, we'll all spill over like water to something else like Google Plus.