[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.