[jonnathanson]

I tend to agree. Call me crazy, call me naive, call me idiotic, but I just don't see any actual problems for Facebook until/unless a serious competitor for its userbase emerges. Pinterest isn't (yet?) that competitor, inasmuch as it's not currently a substitute for Facebook; they seem to cohabitate pretty well. Other interest-based networks aren't competitors for the same reason. Google+ doesn't seem to be making much of a dent, probably because the switching costs of rebuilding a social network from scratch are more daunting for most users than anyone expected.

That's not to say a competitor won't emerge, and users won't switch to that competitor if Facebook really mucks up its UX in some unforgivable way. But we should bear in mind that Facebook users aren't just going to jump overboard into the ocean. If they're going to jump ship, it'll be because a better ship has pulled up alongside it.

Revenue challenges? Facebook's got plenty of time to figure those out, and meanwhile, Facebook Connect seems like a pretty powerful weapon of mass monetization in the making.

A lot of the anti-Facebook sentiment out there right now reads like wishful thinking.

[yoklov]

I might be wrong, but I don't think the question is "will Facebook be overturned by another social network?" so much as it is "are social networks even profitable?"

[andyakb]

facebook made $1B profit last year

[yoklov]

Right, but is that sustainable?

I don't claim to know nearly enough about economics to even have an opinion on this subject, I'm just saying that I thought the question the article was asking was more about the economic value of Facebook (and, by extension, social networks, though, this extension may be pushing it), than it was about whether or not some competitor would be able to "dethrone Facebook", as it were.

[robryan]

As long as they hold onto their user base, that would be on the low end of what you could expect from them in terms of revenue per user. They are trending towards better targeted somewhat more invasive ads. Virtual currency hasn't really got going yet and as mentioned above people expect them to eventually offer something similar to adsense which would have a high chance of being successful because I think they hold the edge of Google in targeting data.

Of course pushing for more profit could turn off users. Google+ though is showing how hard it is right now though to make a significant dent as an opposing social network.

As long as Facebook don't do anything stupid I find it hard to see how they will be beaten with a similar model. It is more likely that something else will be built which changes the whole social networking paradigm and makes Facebook less relevant.