[manish]

I am curious about how Facebook will manage to hold on to its users if some other more attractive social networking site opens up. We do remember what happened to Myspace and Orkut. Google could hold on to search because it was very hard for a new company to build Google kind of search infrastructure.

[minalecs]

I'm actually thinking as younger generations come and find a new place to hangout I think Facebook can be unseated, not easily but in the same way other social networks have fizzled. Google is just a utility, and I think most people really don't care what search engine they are using, just bing and yahoo.. hasn't really given anybody a real reason to switch. Where as when it comes to social status, and hanging out where the cool kids are.. this can cause a shift very fast.

[protez]

In addition, it makes more sense to put some ads for free utility service, but the same ads can be very annoying in the contexts of social communication.

[robryan]

Kinda what Tumblr have become of late, seems like a lot of younger people have began moving at least some of theironline presence over.

[reitzensteinm]

Google was the first search engine that was Good Enough that leapfrogging it became impractical. Facebook may well turn out to be the first social network to get to that level. Or maybe not.

[lsc]

eh, I think much of google's lead is also the infrastructure, and I don't mean the servers. If you showed up at my doorstep with a giant wad of cash and said "build a better search engine" well, about 2/3rds of the people I'd want to hire to help me are already working at google.

[robryan]

The rest are probably working on Bing, seems like Microsoft has a really talent team there, given the relatively small inroads they have made into market share shows just how hard it is to compete.

[lsc]

eh, If you wanted to do this, there was a real opportunity when Yahoo announced that they were going to use bing. There were many very good, very disappointed inktomi folks at Yahoo.

[slantyyz]

At the time, it wasn't just Good Enough, it was great, especially compared to the crappy results that Altavista, Excite and Yahoo churned out.

Now that the internets have expanded exponentially with crap and people gaming the search process, they have dropped down to Good Enough.

[zeraholladay]

I joined Facebook to experiment with the API for a real estate and social network site. I shortly had a longish list of friends, people I'd known for years, family, coworkers, baby pictures, etc. It was fun, but it was a lot of parts of my life in one place.

Most of us live compartmental lives. We're constantly separating various aspects of our lives, cultures and relationships. People, I think, form pretty cool organic amalgamations like large cities, universities, internets, etc. But planned spaces, such as malls, airports and suburbs, tend to be insipid. Facebook is the insipid mixture, IMHO.

I don't know if all social networking sites are equally doomed, but I think it's about the next thing and not necessarily the "next best thing."

[wallflower]

Re: Compartmentalization

Since people don't use friend lists, I believe Facebook will one day offer an auto-compartmentalize feature where it will intelligently build groups for you like talked about here:

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

[greyman]

I don't know about you, but I never had a real-life friend on Myspace or Orkut, while now a lot of them are on FB, even non-geeks. That's the fundamental difference. To unsettle FB, something completely new and much better would need to be invented, surely not something on the level of Myspace or Orkut.

[bertil]

If a company manages scale at a pace threatening for Facebook and promises to handle the infrastructure accordingly, Facebook can suggest they become compatible using shared ideas of identity, relation, authorisation and activity streams. The two first are elementary (for Facebook) and there are protocols being agreed upon for the two last, with Facebook (David Recordon)'s participation. The guarantee to have a significant share of the market should convince either. Two distinct services cater distinct preferences across ties, optimally for both. The two should be prouder of their ability to suggest, develop and cater features enough to expect to beat the other team with time, rather than gambit compatibility. This was not possible with MySpace because they disagreed on identity and relations; Orkut never was threat enough to deserve such a defensive move. Negotiations on who gets what information to target the ads will be slightly more tense than getting on the last row-boat from the Titanic, but at least one side has a CEO & a COO who have already proven they can handle that.

[cloudwalking]

Don't overlook Facebook's advantage of universal popularity. Everybody uses Facebook because everybody is on Facebook. That's a tough barrier for any new player to surmount.

[enjo]

Universal popularity isn't necessarily that useful. It really just matters that everyone you know is using it.

Just as Facebook used the collegiate social scene to grow, I think theres a lot of potential for a competitor to take a similar route. Find a relatively self-contained community and attack it. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a Facebook killer eventually emerges from the university system just as Facebook did.

[megablast]

This is true, but it could work against the next gen. After all, who wants to be on the same network as their folks? That could make it uncool enough for other to look elsewhere.

[tszming]

It is also very hard to replicate the current FB's infrastructure, for a new company.

[lsc]

Now, that is what killed friendster, so I'm not saying it'd be easy. but computers are getting so cheap so fast that the longer you wait, the easier that will be. Unless facebook can double in compute complexity every two years, this barrier will fade with time.