True, but one thing I've noticed with Facebook is that it was the first big social network that saw widespread adoption across almost all segments of (at least

True, but one thing I've noticed with Facebook is that it was the first big social network that saw widespread adoption across almost all segments of (at least US) society. I don't doubt that it will eventually go the way of AOL and MySpace but there are some key things keeping it in use. With early ISPs like AOL, there was nothing really stopping you from moving to another provider that offered something better. Combined with the move toward broadband, any AOL-exclusive features just weren't enough to keep people around for the most part and you could still access the rest of the web, email, etc. regardless of your provider. With Facebook, you need to use their service in order to interact with people on it. I can't just use Google+ because I like the interface and mobile app better than Facebook. No matter how much I prefer another service, they aren't based on any common protocol like email so I need to use Facebook to interact with people who use it. And with MySpace, the audience was mostly younger people. Sure, some of us had parents or employers that maintained a profile but Facebook was the first big social network that got your mom, your grandma, your boss, your doctor, your old college professor, and all the neighbors on your block to sign up. The under-30 crowd will switch services for something newer and better but the critical mass of Facebook users is hard to get around. Coming back to Google+, I really am one of the (few apparently) people who think it's a much better alternative to Facebook. Chat is better. Levels of sharing work better and are easier to manage. The interface is smoother. There aren't game and app requests. The mobile app is better. Photo sharing is better. Basically on a technical level, it's better all around. But when it came out and I started using it, the thing I quickly came to realize was that even if my techie friends also were trying it out, the vast majority of non-enthusiasts found the idea of setting up a profile to be annoying and not worth their time. They already had a Facebook after all. To use G+ you would either need to maintain two profiles on two services or decide to only talk to the 10% of your contacts who took the time to set up this new thing. In the end, it never really made a dent outside of niche uses (Photography, Ingress players, etc) and has largely become the butt of jokes. Another failed challenger undone by lack of interoperability and the momentum of a large incumbent. If there were some way to choose your platform and still communicate with the same people (a la email) then Facebook would have some sort of competition but there's no way in hell they would open themselves up to that sort of competition. And currently, there aren't any must-have features compelling enough to make people either maintain multiple profiles or just uproot en masse.