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I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted). Time an

I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted). Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will do the same, already peaked and declining as the article notes, suffering from too many people, too much content, and not enough signal to retain users against the oppressive & discouraging noise. "Oh, but FB is different! Everyone is on it, even my grandmother!" many will declare; yes, and odds are your grandmother can tell of her days when CompuServe and AOL were the place to be (to the point of AOL having so much money they bought Time-Warner because they didn't know what else to do with all that cash), yet here she is on Facebook because that's what her grandkids use, but she's thinking of moving on more to Twitter/Instagram/whatever because those kids just don't post much on FB anymore.

dmix 11y ago
There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).
- woah 11y ago
  Counterpoint: Mayflies live as adults for only weeks before mating and dying. Theirs is a brief, beautiful dance of life[0] [0] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365
  - makmanalp 11y ago
    > brief, beautiful dance of life I suspect the mayflies might beg to differ :( We humans can romanticize anything.
geoelectric 11y ago
I don't disagree, but the definition of "everybody" has gotten bigger and that counts too. AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site. I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc. So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off. The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them. Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  I've seen way too many "too big to fail" services fail, to believe Facebook is that much harder to displace. BTW: IBM just announced it's offering Apple computers to its employees.
  - geoelectric 11y ago
    We'll see, of course, but I tend to think that the self-reinforcing nature of social media has different market characteristics than, say, mainframes. Unfortunately, the most obvious comparison--telephone networks--hasn't been a free market for a long time. Though to that point, interoperability between social networks would certainly be a nail in Facebook's coffin. As soon as the service commoditizes to a simple portal all bets are off.

dmix 11y ago

There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).

woah 11y ago
Counterpoint: Mayflies live as adults for only weeks before mating and dying. Theirs is a brief, beautiful dance of life[0] [0] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365
- makmanalp 11y ago
  > brief, beautiful dance of life I suspect the mayflies might beg to differ :( We humans can romanticize anything.

geoelectric 11y ago

I don't disagree, but the definition of "everybody" has gotten bigger and that counts too. AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site. I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc. So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off. The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them. Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.

ctdonath 11y ago
I've seen way too many "too big to fail" services fail, to believe Facebook is that much harder to displace. BTW: IBM just announced it's offering Apple computers to its employees.
- geoelectric 11y ago
  We'll see, of course, but I tend to think that the self-reinforcing nature of social media has different market characteristics than, say, mainframes. Unfortunately, the most obvious comparison--telephone networks--hasn't been a free market for a long time. Though to that point, interoperability between social networks would certainly be a nail in Facebook's coffin. As soon as the service commoditizes to a simple portal all bets are off.