[tvawnz]

Why would you still use FB today? There are better photo sharing apps, there are better messenging apps, there are better broadcasting apps. The fact that FB monolithically encloses these is only relevant on a desktop browser.

FBs biggest strength is it's market share, the fact that you can be reasonably assured that you _can_ look up that girl from that party on it.

But that strength is waning, especially in the sub 20s who are strangely rediscovering what sharing on the internet used to be. We have yikyak instead of IRC for community based anon-chat. We have whatsapp and wechat instead of AIM for non-anon chat. We have tumblr instead of geocities for free expression front walls.

Kind of funny how far people think we've come and how innovative these new apps are. It's all just a rehash wrapped up in pretty colors with trendy logos.

It was cool for about 5 years, then people started realizing that maybe it wasn't a good idea to have your smoking cyph posting pictured of bongs on your biometric profile that you got pressured into sharing with the boss and mom. No clue what happened to that early 90s generation. The late 90s are way more savvy.

[soylentcola]

I (begrudgingly) use Facebook today precisely because of that market share. I agree that there are services that perform the tasks of Facebook more competently (or at least ones that I personally like better) but due to how it's set up, it doesn't do me a lot of good if just about everyone I want to communicate with (in the manner of social/sharing networks at least) is on Facebook.

Facebook managed to grab a huge share of the potential userbase that previous and subsequent services have not. I might like Google+ better for sharing links and photos with friends and family but Facebook is the one that finally got everyone to sign up. There's probably a good portion of Facebook that just won't bother switching to any similar service no matter how much nicer they make the interface or features because it's just too much "friction" for them.

And unlike email where you can host your own or choose from loads of providers, there's not a common protocol that allows you to use a different social sharing service and still communicate with everyone on Facebook. It's not like when I switched my personal email to Gmail in the mid-2000's and could continue to email the same friends and family even though most of them weren't interested in changing providers for more storage. They kept their @aol.com or @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com addresses and I could still send and receive emails.

I honestly don't think anyone's gonna upset this by building a "better Facebook" at this point. If Facebook falls by the wayside I think it will be because the current social-media-type activities are replaced by something else entirely.

Nobody's going to pull up their stakes for some new Facebook+ and maintain two accounts/profiles since half of their contacts don't want to bother. But when more of that sharing and communication starts taking place on a different style of service, whatever form that may take, people will start using FB less and less until it becomes more of a hassle to maintain your account than to leave it.