[146]

I think the thing is that Facebook is learning from this. If there was actually a viable competitor at the time, the whole hype surrounding the incident might be enough to push and bootstrap enough users onto its competitor. We saw this to a limited extent with Diaspora, but given that there wasn't anything to actually sign up for, its hype has mostly fizzled by now.

Right now, Facebook is practically the only game in town, they don't have to worry about these mass migrations. But if Google manages comes up with an even comparably good clone of Facebook, it may become an issue.

[qq66]

Even if Google cloned Facebook line-for-line I'm not sure how would it gain any traction. I have such an incredible amount of metadata locked inside Facebook that it's going to take a LOT to get me to change to anything new. And why -- just so Sergey can own my data instead of Zuck?

[drinian]

And that's the point, really -- don't let your metadata get locked into one service! We should have been supporting exchange standards for this stuff years ago.

That's the downfall of the Web age of the Internet; we (the public) reverted to a client-server attitude rather than a network of equal peers.

My Facebook account is still active, but there's nothing there but an email address and a picture now. I think that's a fair compromise for the time being.