Facebook's time is now. It is a great site that has captured the...

Facebook's time is now. It is a great site that has captured the essence of social networking. But highly vulnerable, IMO.

Commercialisation and changes in technology will kill it, IMO. The main reason that Facebook beat MySpace, Friendster, etc is because the site developers limited the amount of personal modification to the pages. On those other sites things such as custom garish graphics and start-up music made reading many pages unenjoyable.

However if the Facebook pages start to look more like Coke's pages, than that of the intended author, then people will be turned off and someone will offer a very similar, advertisement free, Facebook compatable, alternative. No advertising doesn't mean no revenue, as money can still be made by networking, games, subscriptions etc. Teens and young adults are the main users to populate social networking sites and they are liable to flipping to the latest thing like changes in wind direction. Looking forward, social networking will likely shift to mobile platforms when there is universal usage of touch screen and tablet mobile phones and comprehensive 4G coverage.


Furthermore Facebook went into its IPO touting worldwide 1 billion users and hours accessed. But how many of those are teens in places like India and the Philippines who barely have a spare Rupee or Peso? The very successful and highly profitable Ebay, has not been able to penetrate those markets at all. In reality Facebook are probably only looking at a couple of hundred million users that they can monetise to grow on last year's earnings of $3.5 billion. And how many of those are middle to high income to buy big ticket high market items - a low percentage, IMO.

I can imagine budding social network software engineers are rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity the commercialisation of Facebook provides for a new alternative non-commercial start-up.

A quote from 20 years in the future: "Facebook. Yeah, I remember that."